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C O L O M B I A "HOW DO YOU SAY 'AWESOME' in Spanish?" our translator, Diego, asked as our Jeep clunked and clanked its way down the steep, sloping dirt road leading away from Finca Isabela and back toward town. We looked around at each other in the back seats—a passel of gringa journalists like myself, whose collective confidence in our Spanish skills bordered on zero—and shrugged. "I don't know," someone yelled in reply over the noise of the motor. "How do you say 'awesome' in Spanish?" "Colombia!" Diego shouted with a laugh, his broad smile and winking eyes catching us all in a "gotcha" moment. We let up a cheer and giggled along with the cheesy joke, but it's actually pretty accurate—Colombia is awesome, and just about anyone you meet on a visit there is likely to tell you so. ("It is the best country in the world! You might not want to come back," my airline-ticketing agent said to me when I told her I was headed to Medellín, and she was right.) It's true that Colombia, the jewel of South America, has just about everything going for it: beautiful beaches in Cartagena and Santa Marta, astounding archaeological parks, breathtaking biodi- versity and ecotourism opportunities (the country contains 20% of the world's recorded bird species, with over 1,800 types), and, of course, coffee. Like, a whole lot of coffee. As in, 10.3 million bags' worth in 2013. (That's more than 610 million kilos. A lot of coffee.) Not just any coffee, either: In 2013, roughly 50% of the coffee ex- ported by the National Federation of Coffee Growers (Federación Nacional de Cafeteros, or FNC) was considered specialty—more than double the amount recorded in 2006. So, yeah: "Awesome" is definitely another word for this place. For six days in October, I got to experience that awesome in per- son, all as a part of the annual "Coffee Week" celebrations held in the Antioquia department, one of the country's largest coffee-pro- ducing regions. With a whole host of events—ranging from a local edition of Fritz Storm and Kentaro Maruyama's Barista Camp, to the specialty-coffee education and trade show ExpoEspeciales, to the national coffee championships, to a coffee camp for 1,000 of the nueva generación, to pop-up educational cafés meant to introduce people throughout the region about specialty coffee—the govern- ment of Antioquia along with the FNC set out to extract as much enthusiasm as possible from the local population, as well as national and international coffee obsessives who are naturally keeping their eyes trained to developments within the Colombian coffee market. First, however, let's go back to Diego and that bumping, bouncing Jeep, because it was headed somewhere really special: Juan Val- dez's coffee farm. Yes, I mean that Juan Valdez, and yes, he does own a coffee farm: Finca Isabela, high in the breathtaking mountains of Andes, Co- lombia, within the department of Antioquia. While the first two Don Opposite page, at top: One of the myriad colorful city busses that shule folks around bustling Medellín. Boom: Forest engineer Carlos Mario Ospima manages one of the FNC's many field-research farms, overseeing the development of Castillo seeds, as well as tracking information about the integrity of the variety's resistance to leaf rust and resilience to climate change. This page: Colombia's national barista competition is one of the liveliest, with spillover crowds hooting and hollering for their favorite competitors, and baristas who know how to turn on the heat and keep the spectators—many of whom are coffee farmers and experiencing competition for the first time—on the edge of their seats. 33 www.baristamagazine.com