The Coffee Italians Called "Blue"

A few weeks ago I had coffee with a cupper in Lima. I told him Kaffelito was working with Venezuela. He gave me that look — part curiosity, part skepticism — the one you get when someone says "Venezuelan coffee" in a room where everyone believes Venezuela stopped producing coffee thirty years ago.

I dropped two words: Caracas Blu.

His face changed.

A name the Italians gave it

The bluish tone is part of the story, but the evidence matters more than the label. The IVIC relates the color to the soil characteristics of the Altos de Pipe area.

In the mid-19th century, the coffees from the Caracas Valley — grown on the haciendas of Chacao, El Cafetal, Las Mercedes, Antímano — had a rarity that Italian buyers could not ignore. The green beans, before roasting, were not yellow or green like everyone else's. They were grayish. Bluish. Shot through with iridescence.

Italian buyers named them Caracas Blu. Blue, in Italian. The 15% figure appears in journalistic retellings of that history, but we have not found a primary commercial record that supports presenting it as a universal comparison. We therefore treat it as an attributed claim, not a settled fact.

What makes a bean blue?

It is not magic. The IVIC connects the bluish tone to the soil characteristics of Altos de Pipe in the Altos Mirandinos. The institution places its coffee fields between 1,600 and 1,750 meters above sea level.

The IVIC describes the color as a characteristic of the land and the coffee. There is no need to add a quotation we cannot link to: the institutional source is enough to separate what has been observed from what still needs more research.

The coloration comes from the soil's mineralogy. Magnesium alters the pigment. It is not sky-blue — it is a grayish, iridescent blue that only appears in raw beans. When roasted, the color disappears. The flavor does not.

The disappearance

Oil erased it all.

In the early 20th century, Venezuela was one of the world's largest coffee exporters. The haciendas of the Caracas Valley — La Floresta, Blandín, San Felipe Neri, La Vega — were the productive heart. Today they are neighborhoods that carry those names, unaware that beneath the asphalt lies soil that once grew the most coveted coffee in the world.

Caracas's expansion, fueled by oil, wiped out the haciendas. The coffee trees were uprooted. And Caracas Blu became a legend that old-timers remembered but no one could prove.

Until now.

What is happening in silence

I will not tell you everything today. But this much: in 2024, IVIC documented coffee production in Altos de Pipe after years of planting and care. The institution describes its bluish tone and the research around the crop; its article does not publicly establish that every plant is a century old.

In another official note, IVIC records an excellence level of 87. The same publication says the coffee was expected to be sent to Europe for quality certification. That is the wording we can support.

And the blue color was still there.

What comes next

This story has more layers. In the next chapters we explore how something that seemed impossible to lose was lost, who revived it when everyone thought it was dead, and what a Caracas neighborhood has to do with all of this.

The story continues in Part 2: The Loss.

If you take one thing from this post, let it be this: Venezuela's blue coffee is more than a myth. There are institutional observations about its cultivation and a commercial history that still deserves better archives.

And it is coming back.