Red 5 De Diciembre // MEXICO

From the Importer:

Founded in 2020 in the Municipality of San Lucas Zoquiápam in the State of Oaxaca, San Isidro Zoquiapam is located at an elevation of 1966 meters above sea level with a population belonging to the Mazatec ethnic group. The 90 families represented by this group grow Typica, Bourbon, Caturra, and Mundo Novo.

Farmers use concrete-poured home stations for floating and pulping cherry, parchment flotation, and 12-24 hours of fermentation before rinsing and transferring to raised beds for initial drying 1-2 days, moving to patios, often with light-colored tarps, for 6-9 days

Mexico is for coffee lovers. Few origins offer such variety, such competency, and such short flights to the farm. While often overlooked by their neighbors to the north, Mexico is the world’s 7th largest coffee producer, the largest exporter of organic coffees, and a fast-growing community of consumers of specialty coffee. Seventy percent of Mexico’s crop comes from larger estates, concentrated around Veracruz, with the remaining thirty percent coming from 2 million smallholders, spread around the country but mostly in the Southern States of Chiapas and Oaxaca. This is also where we find most of Mexico’s indigenous population, communities who moved higher and higher up-mountain, onto smaller and smaller plots of land, first to get away from colonial Spain, and later pushed by larger landowners during decades of highly political land reforms. In this way, Mexico’s agrarian, coffee, and Puebla movements are intertwined. Though coffee \arrived in Mexico two centuries earlier, it did not take off until the late 20th century. 

In the 1970s a farmer-friendly government came to power and encouraged smallholder production. Coffee exports skyrocketed nearly ten-fold over the next two decades. However, in the middle of this growth, the government had to default on debt, cut back programs, and end a decade of federal support for smallholders. Price, markets, and credit dwindled to drips – and on top of that – we got some Roya (coffee rust) too. Oh, and did we mention the condition of the peso? Adding to this distressed situation, we see the rise of the coyote; middle-men who build truckloads of coffee up from 1-5 bag household level. Still today, buyers look for points of aggregation that can cut out middle men, but still give them access to volumes.