After being fully vaccinated, I happily took to the road to visit our producing and importing partners in Oaxaca, Mexico. Oaxaca has become a critical part of our coffee supply and our relationships here have strengthened and deepened. We first started hearing about exceptional Mexican coffees in 2016. Surprisingly underdeveloped and undersourced, there was huge opportunity and huge work to do here. We tasted the opportunity in our first Mexican offering in 2017 from the village of San Pedro Yosotatu, a full six hour drive from the capital, Oaxaca de Juarez. This remote village has perfect growing conditions and old bourbon and typica stock. The processing is humble, yet done well. We've been offering this coffee every year since and have expanded into several other regions in Oaxaca, Veracruz, and Chiapas.
This trip we were focused on two things: visiting Yosotatu and tasting through the harvest selections from 2021. The harvest in Mexico starts in January and continues through mid March. We visited in April to taste through all of the samples from the best of the harvest. Our importing partners, Red Fox Coffee Merchants are working diligently to find the most interesting coffees and reward the producers with premiums that incentivize quality. The coffee landscape is diverse and complicated. It's hard work to sort it all out and Red Fox is the best in the business.
We're happy to report we'll be buying coffees again from Yosotatu as a community and two single producer lots from the village as well. Especially exciting, we'll be bringing in coffee from one of our favorite people, Aurturo Ramirez. Other Oaxacan selections we tasted that we're excited about were coffees from the village of Yaitepec, Coatlan, and Miramar. From Veracruz, we'll be bringing in coffee from producer Jose Cienfuegos as it tastes like raspberry and green apple. From Chiapas, another selection from Finca Santa Cruz. And then a new project we're excited about from the new to us region of La Cañada. A couple of these coffees tasted like peach nectar! Yum.
Thanks for reading.
Look for these coffees this summer!
