Grown by a small community of Mayan farmers in the Chiapas region of southern Mexico.

Mexico

Cafeólogo

Cafeólogo is a project founded by Jesús Salazar, focussing mainly on indigenous coffee growers in the area around San Cristobal de las Casas in central Chiapas, the southernmost region of Mexico. San Cristobal is located rather close to the border with Guatemala, and is in fact only around 200 km or about a 5 hour drive from San Marcos Huista in Huehuetenango, where we have purchased several coffees in the past.

Starting in 2010, Jesús initially worked with 4 small producers, but soon many producers in the area were curious about the project, and the prices they could be paid for their coffee through their newly found access to the speciality market. To be able to accept so many more farmers into the project, Jesús realised that quality control would be very difficult if each producer was to grow and process their own coffee. So he made it his mission to add value to each group of producer’s work through careful processing, undertaking a Q-processing course and building two community wet mills, Sibactel and San Pedro.

This particular lot is all about processing, with full cherries fermented without oxygen in cool conditions before drying. This leads to a very different expression compared to our other releases this season from Cafeólogo, with ripe fruit and sweet chocolate liqueur character. Often small groups of neighbours, with such small farm sizes, share resources and deliver cherry to the wet mills together. This lot is composed of cherries from Práxedes Castañón, Tomy Tomás, Juan Jacob and Edilio Tomás.