Coffee is a story. A family. A heritage.

Coffee reached Colombia in the early 1700s, carried in by Jesuit monks. The first written mention dates from the 1730s, and in 1835 the first sacks left the country. By the end of that century coffee was Colombia's biggest export, and the families who grew it were building the country as much as they were bringing in a harvest.

In 1927 the growers founded the Federación Nacional de Cafeteros. It still pays for research, builds the roads and bridges that reach remote farms, and stands behind the people who pick the cherries. It is a large part of why a small farm on a steep mountainside can sell to the world.

The Andes cut Colombia into three ranges, and coffee grows on their slopes: high, wet and fed by volcanic soil. Because the farms sit at different points on the map, the country has two harvests a year. In the north and east the main crop comes in from September to December, with a smaller mitaca in April and May. In the centre and south-west it is the other way round: March to June, then a mitaca in October and November. Somewhere in Colombia, coffee is always being picked.

Cundinamarca, the region around Bogotá, climbs the eastern side of the Andes from 900 to 2,200 metres above sea level. Coffee began there on large haciendas and passed into smallholders' hands during the twentieth century. It is the region our own family comes from: our grandparents worked the land at La Peña long before there was a Kaffeparken. Further north, Antioquia, the country's second-largest coffee region, is home to around 79,000 coffee-growing families on small, steep farms between 1,300 and 2,200 metres.

Two varieties turn up again and again in Colombian cups. Caturra is a dwarf mutation of Bourbon that appeared in Brazil in the 1910s and reached Colombia in 1952; its low trees can be planted close together and picked easily by hand, and for years it made up nearly half of the country's coffee. Castillo was bred by Cenicafé, the federation's research centre, to resist leaf rust. It mattered: between 2008 and 2011 rust cut Colombian harvests by more than 30%.

Almost every cherry is still picked by hand, because the slopes are too steep for machines. Small family farms bring in the crop themselves, with neighbours lending a hand and getting one back the following week. Bigger farms rely on seasonal pickers, and fewer people want that work each year. Add wilder weather, rising costs and the aftermath of the pandemic, and every cup rests on a lot of resilience. Many growers now plant native trees between the coffee, which stores carbon, shelters the soil and the water, and cuts the need for fertiliser. That is the world Andrés David Gutiérrez and his brother Sergio carry with them into Kaffeparken.