Your highway pit stop to the best Organic Mexican coffee around...right here! Excited to offer an exclusive taste-peek into a small-scale, community operation which has no parallel in Central America in term of traceability. Tepic, Nayarit State, on the west coast of Mexico above Guadalajara, has a near-perfect microclimate for coffee and many other agricultural products. Certified organic and Bird-Friendly, this "Patio Lot #150 El Cuarenteno Melaza" is one of many washed and natural process microlots which have become a hallmark of El Cuarenteno's producers.
It is a community project sourced from 20 growers in El Cuarenteno of eight distinct varietals which resulted in 93 30-kilo bags total (just under 6,200 lbs. all told) of production. On the heels of our awesome Nayarita Fantastico and Peach Reserva from the last two harvest years, which had a long run at Badbeard's, we couldn't be happier to get this coffee to you! The naming of these select microlots conveys the relevance of traditional agriculture in Tepic and the surrounding region, where sugarcane has been very important for many generations of farmers; Melaza translates as Molasses (or treacle). Not surprisingly, molasses is one of the prominent cupping table notes of this sweet coffee, as well as Peach, Floral, Apple, Dried Fruits, Honey, and Orange.
As with all the production from Terruno Nayarita, this lot is fully traceable. Using the addresshttps://trackyourcoffee.com/tracker?entry=GTN9902056
you can see all the exquisite details as well as many of the faces of the various farmers. The following, in granular detail you won't find anywhere else in the coffee world with an actual farm visit, is provided by our partner San Cristobal Coffee, which launched efforts to turn Nayarit into a mini-paradise for coffee lovers back in 1991.
El Cuarenteño is a rural community located in the foothills of Sierra de San Juan, just west of Tepic. The area was initially settled in 1910, established as the center of a wealthy landowner's farm. Several years later, the owner received petitions from his workers wanting to buy pieces of his land, but he declined their offer preferring instead to lease the property. In 1939 the Mexican government passed an agrarian reform resolution allowing the formation of Ejidos*. The following year the community of El Cuarenteño was granted an endowment of 3,500 hectares to form their own Ejido.
The community of El Cuarenteño produces both organic and conventional coffee. CAFESUMEX has relationships with three different societies in the community: PROCAA, BASILIO, and RIVIERA, two of which have their own wet mill processing facilities. Currently El Cuarenteño has about 840 hectares of coffee in production at altitudes between 900 and 1400 meters (2900 to 4600 ft). The landscape provides a beautiful panorama and breathtaking views of the famous “Three Marias Islands” on the Pacific Ocean.*An Ejido is a community comprised of communal lands designated for agricultural production. Each Ejidatario (joint land owner/farmer) has individual rights to a parcel of land or parcela, these rights can continue indefinitely and be passed on to their children, as long as the land is under consistent cultivation. With its ideology dating back to the calpulli system of the Aztecs, the Ejido system was established by the Mexican government in 1934. The establishment of an Ejido would begin with landless farmers who typically leased lands from wealthy landlords petitioning the government. The government would then consult with the landlord, and redistribute the land if the Ejido was approved. The Ejido would then be established, designating the original petitioners as Ejidatarios with individual rights to the land. Each Ejido is registered with Mexico's National Agrarian Registry (Registro Agrario Nacional). The Ejido system was eliminated in 1991, citing low productivity of communally-owned land. While existing Ejidos were not disbanded and remain to this day, it is largely viewed that their elimination was a direct result of the NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) of 1994.