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Malinal coffee grower Lucio Miranda inspects his crop. By Maja Wallengren
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The first main flowering this year in Mexico’s Chiapas covers the state like a carpet of snow. By Maja Wallengren
One of the world’s 10 largest coffee producing countries, North American coffee producer Mexico has been growing coffee for close to 280 years. But multiple issues, from persisting low global prices to the onset of the massive attack of the rust pest, have caused a lingering crisis that has proven difficult for the country’s growers to overcome. In the midst of crisis, it is Mexico’s many tiny and mostly unknown coffee-growing states that have started to emerge as exciting and exotic new sources of quality beans for coffee lovers across the specialty markets.
From the rugged mountain highlands of the east-central state of Hidalgo, named after one of Mexico’s most beloved Independence heroes, to the dense pine forests of the bioreserves of the Huichol Indians in the Pacific coast state of Nayarit, some of the tiniest Mexican coffee producing states are earning new acclaim for growing quality beans.
The secret, industry officials agree, is thanks to a number of facts, including the presence of many highly diverse microclimates, the careful attention to cultivation practices in these states exclusively managed by tiny smallholder family-owned farms not dependent on hiring manual labor, and the existence of old heirloom varieties.
This is all good news to the coffee industry as a whole, because as Mexico’s top four growing states of Chiapas, Veracruz, Puebla, and Oaxaca struggle to recover from erratic climate and years of below-cost prices, the smaller states help keep the name of Mexican coffee alive with roasters and importers abroad, said Arturo Hernandez Fujigaki of Etrusca Coffee Company, speaking to STIR in an exclusive interview.
“We still have a lot of small areas with coffee production in Mexico, which because they have been isolated from the main growing regions for so long, have a lot of farms where we can still find truly unique quality microlots because the farmers have a very high share of the old varieties like typica and bourbon,” said Hernandez. “These varieties are very popular with roasters not only because they are famous for their cup quality, but also because these varieties are disappearing very fast from many parts of the world, more so now with the rust,” he said.
For most of the last 20 years up until the latest outbreak of rust – which started in Central America in mid-2012 – the typica, bourbon, and caturra varieties were among the most desired beans for roasters and formed a big part of increasing the knowledge and popularity for flavor profiles among new generations of coffee 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 negative 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 increasingly 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 Edelmann, owner of the six-generation Finca Hamburgo in the Soconusco 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 account 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 Agriculture (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 international prices fell to historic lows in the 2000-2004 coffee crisis.
These tiny estates make up Guerrero, Hidalgo, San Luis Potosi, Tabasco, Colima, Campeche, Michoacan, Jalisco, Queretaro, 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 planting 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 feeding 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 growers 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, meanwhile, were among the first in Mexico to embark on the new opportunities 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 century, 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 outside 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 Mexican 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 coffee 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 overwhelming success, with local grower Federico Barrueta taking the #2 spot for Estado de Mexico in the 2018 Cup of Excellence auction 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 Edelmann 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.