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

It is not a variety. It is not a hybrid. It is the soil itself that gives the bean its color.

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.

The Italians, who were Venezuela's largest coffee importers in Europe, named them Caracas Blu. Blue, in Italian. And not just for the color: that coffee sold for 15% more than any other in the world.

What makes a bean blue?

It is not magic. It is the soil. It is the altitude. It is the combination of magnesium, acidity, and microclimate that only exists in the Altos Mirandinos, 1,700 meters above sea level.

Professor Mario Fernández, from the CQI — the institute that certifies coffee quality worldwide — put it plainly: "I have never seen a blue color in a coffee bean like the one from Venezuela."

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, a group of scientists from IVIC recovered coffee shrubs between 80 and 100 years old — the same ones that grew when those haciendas still existed. They planted them under eucalyptus and pine trees, in soil everyone had written off. And it worked.

The coffee they produced scored 87 points in international cupping. For context: anything above 80 is considered specialty. This coffee nearly touched excellence.

And the blue color was still there.

What comes next

This story has more layers. In the coming chapters I will tell you 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.

There are stories coming that even I did not expect when I started researching. And Chapter 2 is almost ready.

If you take one thing from this post, let it be this: Venezuela's blue coffee is not a myth. It is real, it has science behind it, and the Italians paid more for it than for any other for decades.

And it is coming back.