Coffee Farm Stays

from Fresh Cup Magazine | July 2018

Specialty coffee comes from the most remote places on Earth, often only accessible with four wheel drive and fluency in the local language.

But some coffee farms are using boutique hotels and guided tours to transform the way people experience coffee origins. This new wave of ecotourism is making coffee farms more accessible, and giving some farmers a chance to diversify their revenue streams.

“Most farms aren’t set up to be super visitor friendly,” says Andrea Allen, co-owner of Onyx Coffee Lab in Springdale, Arkansas. “You go and you visit and you hike. You can’t stay there.”

**La Palma Y El Tucán in Colombia features nine private cabins.**

Allen’s experience visiting other coffee farms contrasted sharply with her visit to La Palma y El Tucán, a coffee farm with an experiential hotel in Zipacon, Colombia.

“Everything about them is boutique,” says Allen. “It feels like you’re on vacation, even if you’re on a buying trip.”

Located 90 minutes from Bogotá in the Eastern Andes Mountains, La Palma y El Tucán features nine private cabins. In addition to the horseback riding, yoga classes, and hot tub one might expect from a boutique hotel, La Palma offers a variety of coffee-centric experiences. Guests can enjoy coffee from the farm prepared by a staff barista, plant coffee seeds, pick cherries, and watch the coffee be processed with La Palma’s signature lactic acid processing technique.

The hotel concept was borne out of the farm’s relationship with its coffee buying partners.

“After a couple of years of establishing our coffee project and bringing clients to our farm, we began to notice that the experiences that we designed for each origin trip really made a difference for our clients,” says Elisa María Madriñán, cofounder of La Palma.

“We invested a lot of time and resources in the infrastructure of the farm and this helped in better explaining what our model was all about. Having them diving deep into our daily activities at the farm was one of our obsessions and the most powerful way to transfer knowledge, empower all our stakeholders, strengthen relationships and share our value.”

**La Palma Y El Tucán's inviting café and bar**

This has been true not only for professional coffee buyers, but other visitors as well.

“At the beginning, most of [our guests] were related in some way to the coffee industry. One year later, we’re hosting visits from coffee lovers from all over the world who have an interest in further understanding what goes on behind their every morning cup,” says Madriñán. “What honors us the most, is that Colombians have also shown a lot of interest in visiting and for us is very satisfying to share our space with our compatriots.”

For Madriñán, ecotourism can have a positive impact amongst coffee farming communities. “Not only does this activity generate additional income for the farm helping to cover its fixed costs, but it also promotes labor opportunities amongst the local coffee growers and their families,” she says.

BOQUETE

The “coffee farm as eco-tourist destination” trend is not limited to Colombia. Across in the border, the Panama Tourism Authority has embraced specialty coffee as a way to attract ecotourists. Their recent “Visit Panama” advertising campaign heavily features Boquete, a growing region famous for producing some of the world’s most expensive micro-lots.

Tourists who stop by the visitor center in Boquete can book a coffee tour, which includes a cupping at Elida Estate, one of the Lamastus’s families three farms and a frequent winner at the Best of Panama. For many visitors, this will be their first cupping, and some will be lucky enough to taste the Lamastus’s famed green tip geisha variety.

Just on the other side of the hill from Elida Estate is Finca Lerida, a coffee farm which converted its farmhouse and bungalows into a boutique hotel. According to hotel naturalist Cesar Caballero, most guests came at first for bird watching, but increasingly, coffee buyers and enthusiasts have edged out the ornithophiles.

Far from “roughing it,” guests stay in bungalows outfitted with Scandanavian furniture (a nod to the plantation’s Norwegian founder), satellite tv, internet, and a personal hammock. Guest can take a guided tour of the farm, taste a sampling of the different varieties and processes in the cupping lab, or take a shuttle into town to sample Boquete’s locally brewed craft beer.

Story by Michael Butterworth

This article is from:

Fresh Cup Magazine | July 2018