STiR coffee and tea magazine

STiR coffee and tea 33 and popularity for flavor profiles among new generations of cof- fee lovers at the heart of the growing specialty culture across the world. Many growers, especially at bigger farms across Mexico, had already prior to started to replace typica and bourbon plants with more productive and disease resistant varieties, as the nega- tive impact of climate change started to grow. By the time the rust outbreak started to spread to Mexico ahead of the 2013-14 harvest cycle, the fate of the beloved caturra cup was also in- creasingly threatened because of the variety's weakness to rust. "It is interesting to observe that in all these smaller coffee- growing states, the farmers have been able to manage the rust much better, in part because the producing areas are smaller so the rust fungus doesn't spread as quickly, but also because the farmers are all family-run, so you don't have a big introduction of manual labor coming from outside the region like it does on all the bigger farms in states like Chiapas," said Tomas Edel- mann, owner of the six-generation Finca Hamburgo in the So- conusco region of Chiapas, which is home to about 40% of the state's annual output in an average production cycle. The states of Chiapas, Veracruz, Puebla, and Oaxaca ac- count for 90-95% of Mexico's entire national crop and have long been known to buyers and roasters alike for producing top- quality beans from a variety of sources from big single estates and cooperatives to tiny independent growers. The balance of Mexico's annual harvest, forecast by the US Department of Ag- riculture (USDA) to reach 3.3 million 60-kilogram bags in the current 2020-21 cycle, is made up from hundreds of tiny lots picked across 11 other coffee growing states, where the focus on quality over quantity has been growing ever since interna- tional prices fell to historic lows in the 2000-2004 coffee crisis. These tiny estates make up Guerrero, Hidalgo, San Luis Po- tosi, Tabasco, Colima, Campeche, Michoacan, Jalisco, Quere- taro, Nayarit, and the State of Mexico, which surrounds most of the capital of Mexico City. In Nayarit, coffee growing started over 150 years after a group of French families who arrived in the 1860s started plant- ing the first farms in the Malinal region, located two hours by car, straight up to the mountains from the state capital of Tepic. "We still have a lot of the old typicas here, so we get big beans, which the buyers really like," said Lucio Miranda of the Ejido Malinal Cooperative in Nayarit. "When we first started to work on improving quality, it was very difficult to get the local growers to understand why it was important to only pick the ripe and fully mature cherries because it meant a lot of extra work, but after a few years, we started to realize that even with all the extra work, it was better for us producing coffee this way because we ended up receiving a higher price," Miranda told STIR during a visit to the Nayarit coffee lands. A little further to the south of Nayarit in Mexico's western Sierra Madre mountain range, a tiny coffee growing community of about 800 farmers in the state of Colima has long been feed- ing on the fertile soils from the Volcan de Fuego, which remains an active volcano and regularly erupts with nearby coffee farms seeing their soils sprayed with the rich ashes fertilizing the fields. Today, the Colima growers in the Integradora Cooperative have been able to establish direct links with buyers in the US, who only have high praise for their new suppliers. "We are proud to be the first and only international buyer of coffee from Colima [as the] coffee, the capacity, and the will are all there to make this a premium destination for specialty coffee buyers," reads a blog post from Brooklyn-based Crop to Cup Coffee Importers, which started to work with coffee growers in Colima a few years ago and buys fully washed typicas and bourbons with complex cup profiles." The going has not been easy – but just wait, they [growers] are earning a name for themselves." reads a blog post from Brooklyn-based Crop to Cup Coffee Importers, which started to work with coffee grow- ers in Colima a few years ago and buys fully washed typicas and bourbons with complex cup profiles. Coffee was first introduced to Mexico's Veracruz state from the Caribbean island of Martinique in the early 1740s, and over the next 100 years gradually spread to Chiapas and then most of the other highland regions across central and southern Mexico. Growers in the Atoyac region in the state of Guerrero, mean- while, were among the first in Mexico to embark on the new op- portunities offered by the specialty movement in the early 1990s, but the complications of high levels of insecurity and corruption running deep in the state eventually forced these growers to miss out on the first two decades of specialty developments. "We have had coffee in Guerrero since the turn of the cen- tury, and we have some very good growing areas here, including mountain areas with coffee grown at strictly high altitudes of 1200 meters and more than 80% of the coffee sun-dried on out- side patios," said Esteban Castro, who was part of the team that worked to give rebirth to Guerrero's famous "Natural Atoyac" beans over the last 20 years. Even though the area in production in Guerrero, like in the rest of the country, has been reduced over the last 20 years, the quality reports serve as powerful proof of the efforts achieved since Mexico's second Cup of Excellence auction in 2013; beans from Guerrero have been a constant in the top 10 of Mexico's finest. Watching the boom in specialty coffee from Mexico even inspired a new generation of growers to add a state to the Mexi- can coffee map, with a handful of independent entrepreneurs starting planting coffee in the State of Mexico between 2004 and 2005, making it the country's 15th coffee growing state. "We had seen the development and demand for quality cof- fee in Mexico City growing since the late 1990s and decided that, being so close to the capital, it was an obvious opportunity especially for the more rural areas where poverty is still high and coffee production can help create jobs," Enrique Rodriguez, one of the pioneers in the Temascaltepec coffee region, told STiR in a recent interview. The results have been an overwhelm- ing success, with local grower Federico Barrueta taking the #2 spot for Estado de Mexico in the 2018 Cup of Excellence auc- tion with his washed bourbon-caturra lot, earning 90.47 points and fetching an impressive US$28.30 per pound. At Finca Hamburgo, the first main flowering for the next 2021-22 harvest started on March 27, and like a carpet of snow, the white flowers have covered trees across the estate. "We are finishing this harvest at about 20% down from last year after having to spray five times against rust," said Edel- mann of Finca Hamburgo. "Coffee production has become very expensive in Mexico, but even with all the problems of climate and low prices, there is still a future for coffee here, and we continue to find new clients who are willing to pay for quality coffee." The tiny growers in Mexico's smallest coffee states are proof of this, and the industry is sure to follow them closely.

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