Café Cultor should be one of the most popular places to drink specialty coffee in Bogota.
However, it tends to fly under the radar of many coffee enthusiasts. Visitors to Colombia have heard of Juan Valdez or even Amor Perfecto, but they often look at us with confused faces when we mention Café Cultor.
With four coffee shops and four different concepts, at Café Cultor you’ll find the specialty coffees you want at amazingly inexpensive prices and genuinely good service.
Café Cultor coffee shops in Bogota
Get your caffeine craving met fast in their smallest spot, inside a recycled shipping container in Zona G. They call it the Contenedor, and it was the first shop they opened. It’s easy to miss – many people work every day in that area and don’t even notice this small shop. Keep an eye out for a small sign that marks the entrance. The Contenedor has an upstairs area that’s ideal on a sunny day.
The coziest Café Cultor spot is inside the Wilborada bookstore, just a couple of blocks away from the well-known Avenida Chile Mall. It’s packed with books and comfy sofas, a tiny brewing bar, and baristas loaded with appropriate coffee geekiness. This spot opens late in the morning, so plan on an afternoon visit.
If you’re downtown in La Candelaria, soak up the academic feel of this Café Cultor coffee shop in the huge Luis Ángel Arango library. The coffee shop is hidden well inside the library, so you’ll have to ask the library staff how to get there. If you don’t speak Spanish, the best thing is to show them a picture of the Café Cultor logo and have them point you in the right direction.
Our favorite location is Café Cultor Casa. It’s in the diverse and ever-changing Quinta Camacho neighborhood, our favorite area for restaurants and coffee shops. It’s the largest of the four shops, where there are plenty of intimate corners for private conversation or business meetings.
Locals love it for the inviting garden out back, with gas fireplaces to keep you warm on a chilly afternoon or as romantic lighting on an evening date. There you can get a peek at the master roaster working at his lime-green roaster.
Breakfast and lunch are made in-house, so try out their omelets, sandwiches or risottos. If you want lighter fare, you can get snacks around the clock like empanadas (they even have vegan ones) or cakes made with Colombian fruits.
A unique drink is their tart limonada de cafe, which has no lemons or coffee beans. Or try Café Don Agustino, their version of coffee served on a farm, fancied up with spices.
How Café Cultor sources their coffee
Café Cultor springs from a coffee export company that wanted to bring coffee education to the general public in Bogota. They have coffees from seven regions around Colombia (a region is a department or area the coffee is grown in) and strongly focus on coffee education for coffee growers as well as consumers.
They work with 10,000 farmers around Colombia to help them produce the best coffee possible. In a highly competitive market, coffee has to be more than just good. It has to be excellent, and bring with it any of the labels that people look for now: Rainforest Alliance, organic, benefits women coffee growers, and more.
And more than just sourcing…
Café Cultor helps farmers understand and develop better cultivation practices and coffee processing. In turn, those improvements benefit the farmers as well as their community and the environment. Café Cultor also pays well above the market price and help farmers get their coffee into the hands of buyers.
They also have programs that help farmers in high-risk and conflict areas to overcome the challenges they’ve had to deal with for decades – and sell their extraordinary coffees with extraordinary stories.
As you can tell, Café Cultor hits all the right buttons: Rainforest Alliance, Direct Trade, and sustainable in both economically and environmentally ways. So you can feel good about purchasing coffee that significantly impacts the growers and the country.
When we take our Specialty Coffee Workshop guests to Café Cultor, they can often meet one or more of the owners and listen to them speak about their mission to help coffee growers. That adds a whole new level to enjoying coffee in Colombia.
What coffees can you taste at Café Cultor?
When you go to Café Cultor, you may be overwhelmed by the choices in coffees. Tolima…Sierra Nevada…Manaure…and many more. Depending on their roasting schedule, they may have 8 or 10 coffees available at any given time. To make it even more complex, some coffees are labeled “exóticos” because they are the product of infrequent harvests or are available in small quantities.
The upside is that the coffee experts here have an almost scientific approach to coffee preparation. The baristas agonize over selecting just the right coffee for each brewing method, take time to grind it properly, and getting the pour just right.
So linger over a cup at the coffee bar and put the baristas to the test with all your toughest questions. While it helps if you know Spanish, a number of them do speak pretty good English.
Just a note about regions: the region is the area of the country the coffee is grown in, and each region has its own profile. In Colombia, where the coffee growing regions extend from far north to far south, regions vary in latitude, altitude, soil conditions, microclimates, rain patterns, and traditions.
These will all affect the flavors, body, aroma, and acidity you’ll find in your coffee. If that seems overwhelming to you, ask the baristas about it – or take one of our Specialty Coffee Workshops and we’ll explain it all to you.
When to go to Café Cultor
Since most of the Café Cultor locations are packed in the early morning, you might want to plan your visit for a bit later, after 9 am when the office workers are tucked away in their cubicles. Or try again well after lunch (after 1:30 pm) and on into the evening.
The lunch crowd at Café Cultor Casa is overwhelming, so try to avoid it. Unless you’re going to have lunch there, in which case we suggest you get in early before the kitchen runs out of their most popular items.
Check out what we’re doing with coffee on Instagram, Facebook or Pinterest.
Where to find Café Cultor in Bogota
Contenedor: Calle 69 # 6 – 20, Zona G, Bogota
Wilborada Bookstore: Calle 71 # 10 – 47, Chapinero, Bogota
La Candelaria: Calle 11 # 4 – 14 (inside the Luis Angel Arango Library)
Café Cultor Casa: Calle 70a # 9 – 44, Quinta Camacho, Bogota
