He coffee that comes to your table or is a pretext for a good meeting with friends, with a story behind it; The planting, roasting and selection process make this grain a high-quality art that conquers the taste buds and forms an essential part of Ecuador’s identity and history.

Coffee business goes beyond selling and exporting, Escoffee is committed to providing information about the consumption of special coffee

All this journey that this product goes through – how it originates, what the production entails, who is behind it, what qualities make the coffee produced in Loja special – is collected in the documentary series Café de Loja: science, art and tradition, Produced by the Scientific Culture team of the Department of Communications of the Private Technical University of Loja (UTPL).

Images from the documentary ‘Café de Loja: science, art and tradition’.

“In the audiovisual field, we have always seen an opportunity to tell stories, sciences, about subjects that have compelling potential and Coffee is clearly a subject that interests people very much precisely because of their daily lives.”holds Javier Vasquez, Head of Scientific Culture at UTPL.

“We must not only be coffee producers, but we must also develop a culture of coffee consumption to know how to consume good coffee…”, Add.

Images from the documentary ‘Café de Loja: science, art and tradition’. Photo: Courtesy

The research included a literature search to see what has been written about coffee scientifically. In addition, they were close to the coffee producers and visited their farms. “We set out and focused on high quality coffee because we have always heard that the best coffee in Ecuador is produced in Loja (…)”there stands that.

In this way, the documentary series is also presented as a very important tourism potential, since the sensory proposal arouses interest among the viewers of the places that appear in the images. “Coffee is sensations, it’s emotions, it’s closely linked to the senses and in this documentary series we wanted it to be very visually sensory,” say.

Vásquez indicates that science and coffee are closely linked, especially when it comes to a high-quality coffee. “It requires very technical management from the start, and the science is there, understanding the microclimates, understanding the nutrients in the soil… the coffee that is in the best coffee shops in the world is a coffee that somehow requires a very important and very detailed technical process,” he explains, noting that there are already coffee growers who have developed a scientific method of coffee production. to apply.

In total there are 7 chapters of about 10 minutes each. It is the second chapter in which a journey is made through the entire process, from the fruit to the international marketer.

Images from the documentary ‘Café de Loja: science, art and tradition’.

Loja is the province with the highest production of specialty coffee in the country and was the winner of 11 of the 16 editions of the Taza Dorada competition. For example, one of the chapters deals with the issue of coffee contests. “We enter the heart of the Golden Cup competition in Loja and see the whole exciting process, how the international judges arrive, how the coffee is judged…”, account.

In the last chapter, coffee is shown more than a drink, but also as a gastronomic piece. “In that sense, we prepare a complete menu based on coffee through the gastronomy school UTPL.”

The episodes of the documentary series Café de Loja: science, art and tradition will be published on the YouTube channel @UTPLoficial.