The Coffee:

Region: Patlanalan, Quimixtlán, Puebla

Processing: Washed

Varietal: Mixed

Elevation: 1,700 masl

Tasting: Peach, Honey, Grape

The Origin: Patlanalan, Puebla

Patlanalan is a community in the municipality of Quimixtlán, Puebla, on the Gulf-facing slope of the Sierra Madre Oriental. The municipality runs from 900 to 2,600 meters and averages around 1,960. At 1,700 meters this lot sits mid-slope.

Puebla is not a name people associate with Mexican coffee. Chiapas, Veracruz and Oaxaca take most of the volume and all of the attention; those three plus Puebla account for 85 percent of the country's coffee area. Quimixtlán is remote even within Puebla, which is part of why coffee from here has only recently started moving as separated lots instead of disappearing into commodity blends.

On the process

Mexico is a washed origin almost without exception. The practice here follows the national pattern: ripe cherry depulped the day it's picked, dry fermentation in tanks or barrels, then sun drying. Falcon puts the typical Mexican fermentation window at 12 to 40 hours and drying at 6 to 12 days.

We don't have the tank times for this specific lot yet. When the lot sheet lands we'll publish the real numbers instead of the regional average.

On the variety: what "mixed" actually means

Mexican coffee farms average 2.9 hectares, median 2.0, and roughly 90 percent of the country's 545,000 growers work two hectares or less. Nobody at that scale maintains single-variety blocks.

What you get instead is a plot assembled over decades. Older Typica and Bourbon from before the 1989 crash. Mundo Novo and Caturra layered in during the years there was credit to plant. Catimor, Marsellesa and Oro Azteca put in after leaf rust arrived, because that's what the replanting programs handed out. All of it gets picked together and pooled at a shared wet mill.

The cup result is averaged rather than typical. You give up the single-variety signature that makes a Gesha or a Bourbon legible, and you get breadth in exchange. The peach and honey here sit on a base wide enough that no one variety is driving.

Why Mexican coffee is underpriced

Two events set the terms this coffee is still sold under.

In 1989 the International Coffee Agreement collapsed, removing the quota system that had held a floor under global prices. The same year, Mexico dissolved INMECAFE, the state coffee institute that had driven roughly 900 percent production growth through the 1980s by supplying credit, technical assistance and market access. Growers lost the price floor and the institution inside twelve months. Remote communities lost the most, because they had the fewest alternatives.

Then leaf rust. Between 2012 and 2015 national production fell from around six million bags to 2.8 million, and some regions lost three quarters of their crop. The ICO puts national losses at 50 percent through 2016.

The average Mexican coffee farmer is 54 years old. This country's coffee has been bought as commodity-grade for a generation, and what's available at 1,700 meters in Puebla is well ahead of what the market pays for it.

The Importer:

Falcon Coffees

Falcon is a specialty green trader founded in 2008 and headquartered in Lewes, England. They source from roughly 550,000 smallholder producers across 26 origins and supply more than a thousand roasters.

Their Mexico work concentrates on isolated highland communities between 1,200 and 1,800 meters, the band where the quality is real and the infrastructure is not. Getting a separated lot out of a place like Quimixtlán takes a trader willing to do the logistics on small volumes.