Mexico | Totutla Community | Puebla

Producer // Small-scale producers in Red de Totutla group

Region // Totula, Puebla

Process // Washed

Variety // Typica, Bourbon, Caturra

Altitude // 1200-1450 MASL

Flavor Notes // Almond, Raisin, Chocolate

Roast Level // Medium

From our trader, Crop 2 Cup:

Alfredo Vega Romero, age 34 (2024) has grown coffee his entire life. But he only recently took an interest in the possibilities of specialty coffee when he took an interest in fermentation. This led Alfredo to begin experimenting, roasting, and cupping his coffee – with his family and neighbors. This coffee klatch grew over time to more motivated farmers from the area. In 2024 they joined the GCP program en masse, bringing their coffee to export for the first time. Their next move is to form into a cooperative, to be called ‘Cozoltepetl’ (Nahuatl for Crevices Mountain) in honor of a secret shrine to home of the rain god in the Nahua tradition.

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 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 into 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 too. Oh, and did we mention the condition of the peso?

Into this distressed situation we see the rise of the coyote; middle-men who build truckloads of coffee up from 1-5 bag household level.