Road to Coffee Hunter: Three Educators Learning in Colombia

Junior V. Otero, Helena Oliviero and Natt Muangsiri began 2026 in Popayán, Colombia, with a shared purpose: to learn directly from coffee producers. Our Road to Coffee Hunter introduction described stepping outside the classroom to listen at origin.

The questions behind the journey connected processing with sensory character and competition coffee. What guides a producer’s fermentation and drying decisions? How can those choices be explained clearly to buyers and drinkers? How do market expectations relate to the realities of production?

The team set out to explore these questions through conversations at farms, fermentation tanks and drying beds. Transparency and respect for the producer’s work were central to the approach described in the original post.

This was the beginning of the Colombia journey documented in our later farm and laboratory updates. Browse the original introduction below for the team’s reflections and the questions they took with them.

The original source post is preserved below.