The first time I drank a real Venezuelan coffee, it was in a small importer’s shop in Brooklyn, poured by a man who treated the bag like it was contraband, because in a sense it nearly is. Soft, chocolatey, almost no bite, the kind of cup that makes you slow down. He told me to enjoy it, because he did not know when he would get more. That is the strange position Venezuelan coffee occupies now: a rarity you stumble on rather than something you simply buy.
When people say “Venezuelan black gold,” they mean oil. It was not always so. For most of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, the black gold that made Venezuela rich was coffee, and the country was one of the great coffee powers on earth, a rival to Colombia and Brazil. Today Venezuela grows so little that it has to import coffee to keep its own cups full. It is one of the saddest arcs in the coffee world, a story of a giant that fell, and it is worth telling because it says something about how fragile even a national treasure can be.
Once a coffee giant
This is not a small claim, so let me put numbers to it. By the 1830s Venezuela was the third-largest coffee exporter in the world (Coffee production in Venezuela). Before the First World War its production peaked at around a million bags a year, and among exporters it trailed only Brazil. By 1919, coffee and cacao together made up roughly three-quarters of everything the country sold abroad, and its main customer was the United States. For a stretch of history, Venezuela stood shoulder to shoulder with Colombia as a name that meant fine coffee.
The beans earned that reputation. Grown high in the Venezuelan Andes and shipped historically through the port of Maracaibo, which gave a whole class of these coffees their name, Venezuelan coffee tended to be soft, mild, low in acidity, and gently sweet, the kind of smooth, chocolatey cup that does not fight you. Maracaibo coffees were prized on the world market. This was, by any measure, a serious coffee country.
Where it grows
The heart of Venezuelan coffee has always been the western Andes, in states like Tachira, Merida, and Trujillo near the Colombian border, along with the mountains of Lara. This is high country, and altitude is a gift to coffee: cooler temperatures slow the cherries as they ripen, which concentrates sugars and builds the smooth, balanced sweetness the region is known for. The farms are mostly small, family-run plots worked by hand on steep slopes, the same demanding, unglamorous cultivation that oil made look like a poor bargain. It is worth understanding this geography, because it is exactly the kind of high, cool, small-farm terroir that produces prized coffee everywhere it appears in the world, from Ethiopia to Colombia to these Venezuelan hills. The land never stopped being capable of greatness. Everything that went wrong went wrong above the soil.
How oil buried the coffee
The turning point was literally the day the oil started flowing. Venezuela exported its first barrels of petroleum to the United States in 1917, and the discovery that the country sat on one of the planet’s largest oil reserves rewrote its entire economy. Why nurture a labor-intensive crop grown on steep mountainsides by small farmers when you could pump wealth straight out of the ground? Money, talent, and government attention drained toward petroleum, and coffee, quietly, was left to fade. Export volumes slid, decade after decade, as the country became an oil economy that happened to still grow some coffee.
How politics finished the job
Neglect weakened Venezuelan coffee. Policy nearly killed it. In 2003, the government of Hugo Chavez imposed price controls on coffee, an attempt to hold down inflation by capping what the bean could sell for. The intention may have been to protect consumers, but the effect on growers was ruinous: with prices fixed below what it cost to produce, farming coffee stopped making economic sense, and production fell off a cliff. Nationalization of parts of the industry, chronic shortages, and then the country’s broader economic collapse and hyperinflation finished what the price controls started.
The result is stark. A country that was once the world’s third-largest coffee exporter now produces well under one percent of global coffee, and since roughly 2009 it has had to import green coffee from abroad just to meet its own demand. Venezuela, a former coffee superpower, became a coffee importer. There are few clearer illustrations of how a great agricultural tradition can be undone, not by weather or blight, but by decisions.
The doomed attempts to bring it back
There have been efforts to revive it. One of the more curious was a mid-2000s scheme to sell a “Coffee Venezuela” brand through the state oil company’s Citgo gas stations in American cities, pairing the country’s two black golds and borrowing directly from Colombia’s playbook, which had turned the fictional Juan Valdez into one of the most recognizable faces in advertising. It did not last. Like most attempts to rebuild the industry, it ran headlong into the same collapsing economy that had gutted production in the first place. You cannot market your way out of not having beans to sell.
The neighbor who did it right
It is impossible to tell this story without Colombia, because the two countries started from nearly the same place and ended up in opposite worlds. In the early twentieth century they were peers, both Andean, both growing mild, well-regarded coffee. Then their paths split. Colombia leaned into coffee as a national project: its growers organized into a powerful cooperative federation, invested in quality and infrastructure, and in the 1950s invented Juan Valdez, the fictional poncho-wearing farmer who became one of the most recognized faces in advertising and permanently fixed “Colombian coffee” in the world’s mind as a mark of quality. Venezuela, meanwhile, let oil money do the thinking and let the coffee slide. Same mountains, same era, same bean, wildly different endings. Colombia shows what Venezuela’s coffee could have been.
Can you still find Venezuelan coffee?
Barely, and this is the question readers ask most. The Citgo gas-station brand is long gone. Genuine Venezuelan coffee is a rare sight on shelves abroad now, because so little is produced and even less is exported. A handful of specialty importers occasionally carry small lots of Andean Venezuelan coffee, usually at a premium and never for long, and that is really your only shot outside the country. If you find some from a roaster who can vouch for its origin, it is worth trying precisely because it is so uncommon. Just do not expect to grab it at the supermarket; those days ended decades ago.
The part that actually stings
Statistics do not capture the real loss here, but a reader of this site once did, in a single line. Having grown up on Venezuelan coffee, she wrote, she could attest it was genuinely good, and she longed for the days when all Venezuelans could afford to drink it. That is the quiet tragedy underneath the export charts. In a country that once supplied the world with fine coffee, ordinary people now struggle to afford a cup of their own. The beans still grow in the Andes, tended by small farmers who kept the tradition alive through everything, but the country that grew great on coffee can no longer easily enjoy it. If you ever get the chance to try genuine Venezuelan coffee, and it is rare abroad now, drink it knowing what it represents: the remnants of a golden age, and the resilience of the people who never quite let it die.
For more on the countries that grow the world’s coffee and how each origin earned its reputation, see our guide to the coffees of the world, and if you want to understand the Bourbon and Typica varieties that built Andean coffee, our guide to coffee bean varieties traces that family tree.
Discussion 3
where can one buy citgo coffee beans
Delicioso el sabor.
Having grown up on Venezuelan coffee, I can attest that it is indeed good stuff. I long for the days when all Venezuelans could afford to drink it.