Bodega

Colombia is famous for growing and exporting a product that some people around the world are hopelessly addicted to. Yes, rich Colombian coffee is what we're talking about. In the first installment of this series of videos on Colombia's coffee industry, we get a guided tour of a storehouse for the coffee beans.

"La Bodega," is the title of this video tour, because "bodega" is the word for the coffee beans' "warehouse." It's interesting that "bodega" has its own entry in English dictionaries as a wine shop, a barroom, a storehouse for maturing wine and a small grocery store in an urban area. Well, "bodega" means all of those things in its native Spanish as well, and on top of that it's a place to store coffee beans. The etymology of the word goes all the way back to the Latin "apotheca," storehouse, which itself is descended from the Greek "apotheke" (αποθήκη), which also means storehouse. The more modern definitions concerning wine and groceries evolved from the places where wine or supplies were stored to be sold. And now you know.

Bueno, ésta es la bodega de Almacafé.

Well, this is Almacafé's warehouse.

Caption 6, Una Historia de Café - La Bodega
Play Caption

Ok. So what do we find in La Bodega? Each section of this bodega holds up to 20,000 sacks ("sacos") of coffee beans, each from a particular region ("departamento") of Colombia. We learn that the entire bodega holds approximately 200,000 sacks of coffee beans collected from the harvest ("la cosecha"). Impressed? That's quite a coffee buzz.

Cada, cada nave de la bodega tiene una capacidad de aproximadamente veinte mil sacos de café.

Each, each section of the warehouse has a capacity of approximately twenty thousand coffee sacks.

Caption 19, Una Historia de Café - La Bodega
Play Caption

Soon, we'll post the videos that bring you into the laboratory where the Colombian coffee beans become cups of Joe.

Topics Vocabulary