As you may have read on our About Us, Palma Coffee is a labor of love and respect for coffee. Coffee is so much more than the device that it is brewed in, growing up in Colombia, one of the most notable coffee growing countries in the world, coffee is part of our national identity.
Aside from having an optimal climate for coffee growing, Colombia’s rich environmental offering such as altitude, sunlight radiation, rain, etc. allow the plants to thrive, and therefore produce high quality coffee fruit all year round.
It’s crucial to over-emphasize the importance of the coffee fruit in relation to the coffee bean, and thus, the importance of a healthy coffee plant to yield that fruit.
The recent rise of coffee brewing at home brought by the pandemic has increased the focus on coffee brewing tools, star roasters, and famous baristas, but the brewing and even the roasting of coffee account for less than half of the quality of the finished product.
The best coffee beans start with the millions of families growing coffee around the world that continue to devote their life to this plant. In Colombia alone there are around 600,000 coffee growing families, the vast majority of them multi-generational. In some coffee producing countries, these are viable careers with developed curricula in domestic universities.
This has been top-of-mind for me recently as I stop myself from binging TECNICAFE’s daily innovation summits where I have learned a considerable amount about the many factors affecting coffee plants as well as boundless knowledge of the history of coffee. They have been holding these live YouTube sessions daily throughout the pandemic.
"these videos pack at least 100 times as much coffee knowledge than another brewing how-to"
In their own words, TECNICAFE is a technological park set on bettering the world of coffee through innovation and sustainability. They boast a team of engineers and PhDs in coffee agronomy and these videos which Youtube captions in many languages pack at least 100 times as much coffee knowledge than another brewing how-to. Headquartered a few hours south of Cali, Colombia, and with decades of coffee growing experience,
they are helping hundreds better their life through coffee.
Learning about coffee is not just fun, it enhances your coffee drinking experience.
And though content showing the difference in the cup of grinding just a tad finer or using water two degrees cooler is entertaining, it only highlights the last link of a very significant, robust, and complex supply chain
Instead, understanding the principle of terroir, environmental offerings, altitude, coffee processing methods and the myriad of factors present in the growing of a coffee plant will allow us to truly appreciate this elixir that has accompanied us through millennia. So, though, we will continue to shoot the occasional how-to and share with you some of the gear we brew with, we will continue to dive deeper in the science of the coffee plant and share what we find interesting with you.
