1| Mexico - some cupping:

Map of  Mexico

Mexican coffee originates from South-central to Southern regions of the country. For that reason, coffees from Coatepec and Veracruz are much different from Oaxacan Plumas, which are in turn much different from the Southernmost region of Chiapas. The later is a growing region bordering the Guatemalan growing area of Huehuetenango, and you will find similarities between those coffees. In general you can expect a light-bodied coffee, mild but with delicate flavors ...But there are exceptions of course. Mexican is one of the largest producers of certified organic coffees, and because of the US close proximity, we receive the bulk of fine Mexican coffees in this market. Mexican coffees are worth exploring for the variety of cup characteristics they present, and their great price! Mexicans are moderately priced, lighter bodied, and wide-ranging in their cup character. For this reason, you need to explore coffee selections from each of the regions to get a good sense of the possibilities of Mexican coffee. Unfortunately, I rarely approve of the cup quality of coffees from Coatepec and Atoyac, and have never carried a Veracruz. Most of the impressive coffees I find are from Oaxaca and Chiapas. It may seen to fly in the face of espresso-blending laws, but try an espresso made with 100% Oaxaca coffee, such as the Becafisa Tres Flechas, Loxicha, or El Olivo ...it is excellent roasted just a bit into 2nd crack.

Mexican HG San Pablo -Becafisa
Country:	Mexico	Grade:	HG Altura	Region:	Oaxaca Pluma, San Pablo	Mark:	Becafisa
Processing:	Washed	Crop:	2001	Appearance:	1 d/300gr 17/18 scr	Varietal:	Typica
	Dry Frag./ Wet Aroma:	82/82	Notes: The San Pablo sold under the Becafisa Tres Flechas (trans. Three Arrows) mark is a really great Mexican coffee for straight roasts, blending, and espresso blend base (for a sweet, clean espresso). This coffee is a beautiful bluish green in color, hinting at freshness, good picking / preparation, and a good moisture content. Ukers All About Coffee talks about fine Mexican coffees with a beautiful jade color and a white stripe down the center. This always confused me, and I thought it was another Ukers anachronysm, but this coffee DOES have a distinct stripe of very white chaff. It is a really great cup and as a lark we conducted a bling cupping with 3 Jamaica Blue Mountain samples and the Tres Flechas. This was a totally blind cupping with Jovan and I: we both picked the Mexican as the best cup! Nice chocolate notes, spice, and for a Mexican quite a lot of brightness ...acidity. With the right roast, it rocks. BTW San Pablo is a town, Tres Flechas is an exporter's mark.
	Brightness- Liveliness:	84
	Body- Movement:	82
	Flavor- Depth:	83
	Finish- Conclusion:	84	Roast: City to Full City ...dont burn this stuff! A tad into 2nd OK. Or its great as a blend base in Continental or French roast degrees of roast.
	Score:	82.8	Compare to: good Mexican, very good Mexican!

2| A just coffee

 

Introduction Conventional Coffee Route Alternative Coffee Route Educational and promotional tools Where to find fair trade products Educational tour of Eastern Canada Links

Through the A Just Coffee campaign, Équiterre works to develop fair trade, using coffee as an example of the concept. A team of volunteers and employees organize a variety of public-information activities and encourage business owners to make fair trade coffee more accessible. Équiterre promotes fair trade in order to support the efforts of families trying to improve their lives while also caring for the environment. Look for the certified fair trade label... TransFair Canada is one organization that certifies that the coffee bearing its logo meets fair trade criteria, which are as follows:   The coffee must be bought directly from family cooperatives that use small- scale, environmentally-sustainable production methods. The cooperatives must be democratically organized and use their collective strength to set up community health, education, transportation, and environmental-protection projects.   A minimum of Cdn$3.90 per kilo of Arabica coffee must be paid to participating cooperatives.   Cooperatives can obtain cash advances and/or accesible loans from Northern partners with whom they have long-term agreements. http://www.transfair.ca Taking control of their development More than 300 coffee cooperatives in 18 countries benefit from fair trade. Among these is the Mexican Union de Communidades Indigenas de la Region del Istmo (UCIRI), which represents more than 2,000 families spread out over 51 communities. By unifying their efforts, these peasants have become independent of the local intermediary who previously controlled their exports. They have built an organic-agriculture school, started health projects, and set up a transportation cooperative, a community loan system, and a number of other community-based projects. UCIRI's members practise organic agriculture in order to care for the land that will provide for future generations. Did you know? Coffee prices are determined on the New York and London stock exchanges even though coffee is grown exclusively in Southern countries. Speculation often causes large price fluctuations.   More than 5 million peasant farmers and craftspeople benefit from fair trade.   In Europe, 130 different brand names of fair trade coffee are available at more than 35,000 points of sale. Europeans have access to certified fair trade chocolate, tea, bananas, sugar, orange juice, and honey, as well as various handicrafts.   Fair trade coffee is served in the European, Swiss, Dutch, British, German, and Belgian parliaments and now in the Parliament of British Columbia! Équiterre's A Just Coffee project has been made possible thanks to the support of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), Oxfam-Québec, the Fonds de lutte contre la pauvreté, and the involvement of more than a hundred volunteers from the Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs) of McGill, UQAM, and Concordia universities, as well as from a number of colleges and secondary schools.

3| Mexican farmers stage mass protest against US imports

4| Profile of sustainable agriculture - the key to Finca Santa Elena's future is found in the past  

During World War I, when his aristocratic family lost their property, Johann Bernstorff set sail from Germany, arriving in Mexico in the midst of the country's revolution. With no knowledge of Spanish and very little money, he sought work as a field hand on a coffee farm. While it didn't take long before he had saved enough to move on, his love for a local woman named Carmen Pérez kept him in Chiapas. The two soon married, and he continued to work diligently for local coffee farms, until in 1941, he became the owner of 3,800-hectare (9386-acre) estate where he produced coffee, African palm, cacao and timber.

Several years later he bequeathed part of his holdings -- along with his devotion to the land and its people -- to his son Everardo. Today, Everardo Bernstorff is committed to operating Santa Elena as a profitable and socially responsible organic shade coffee farm that conserves and protects biodiversity. The 267-hectare (660-acre) finca offers living proof that it is possible and profitable to run a business that preserves nature and provides jobs and decent working conditions for local people.

Creating a Sustainable Coffee Farm

Finca Santa Elena is nestled in the verdant hills of the Sierra Madre de Chiapas that rise from the hot, fertile coastal Soconusco Plain of southern Mexico. These slopes are blessed with the richest soil in all of Mexico, making agriculture, especially coffee, the region's primary industry.

With great fondness, Everardo Bernstorff recalls playing in the lush, Chiapas forests as a boy. He remembers picking papayas, avocados and bananas from the trees that thrived on the family farm and being awed by the colorful plumage of the orange-breasted titryas and other resident birds that lived there. He remembers the thrill that he experienced each rainy season, with the arrival of the migratory songbirds from the North. As a result of the swelling human population and the so-called "technified" methods of coffee cultivation developed during the 1970s, which involves the felling of large swaths of forest, these songbirds have been rapidly losing their winter habitat.

Committed to protecting the flora and fauna he had grown to love, Bernstorff converted his farm into a completely organic operation in 1996. Three years later Santa Elena became the first coffee farm in Mexico to earn the Rainforest Alliance's certification seal for complying with a rigorous set of standards that go way beyond organic to include protecting the environment as well as supporting the rights and social conditions of workers and the local community.

"I was worried that when it came time for me to pass Santa Elena on to my children, it would be less productive than it was when I first began here. And if my grandson, Felipe, wanted to take it over in the future, why by that time the soil might not be able to grow much of anything anymore," says Bernstorff. Rainforest Alliance standards were developed by the Sustainable Agriculture Network (SAN), a coalition of conservation groups coordinated by the New York-based nonprofit. A sustainable farm is managed with an eye toward the future. Crops -- in this case coffee -- are cultivated so as to maintain the health and productivity of the natural environment.

In Johann Bernstorff's day, all coffee fincas were sustainably managed. Coffee trees were sheltered beneath a variety of taller trees, which not only provided shade but also contributed to the leaf litter and other organic debris that increases the nutrient levels in the soil and staves off erosion. These canopy trees provide habitat to a wide range of organisms that increase the farm's overall biodiversity as well as provide goods for local consumption, such as fruit for the farm workers. Finally, because shade-grown beans are allowed to ripen slowly, and only the most mature specimens are selected for processing, the coffee has a richer flavor.

To ensure that farms are complying with the SAN criteria, the Rainforest Alliance and its partners send out field specialists who work with farmers to ensure that their operations:

• Protect ecosystems
• Conserve forests, water and soil
• Use shade
• Provide fair treatment and good conditions for all workers
• Maintain a positive relationship with local communities
• Establish an integrated system of waste management

The Benefits of Certification

Bernstorff's commitment to growing his beans beneath the lush forest canopy is contrary to the prevailing trend in Latin America, where the development of low-quality industrial coffee has glutted the market, driven prices down and forced thousands of small producers off their farms toward urban areas and to the North. Because of its short-term profitability, farmers are turning to the environmentally deleterious methods of cultivation.

While high-quality premium coffee costs more, Bernstorff has found that consumers are willing to spend more, knowing that their cup of coffee has not been brewed from beans grown to the detriment of the region's biodiversity, sprayed with pesticides or harvested by underpaid workers. Rainforest Alliance certification is a tool that gives consumers a choice and ensures them that there are buying environmentally and socially friendly coffee.

Says Bernstorff, "I believe that the future of the coffee industry, not just here but around the world, lies in producing a quality product rather than a basic commodity. Only traditional methods, like those we have adopted here, will sustain this in the long run. Our vision, our beliefs, our whole way of life depends on it."

Don't drink coffee, but want to support the Rainforest Alliance? Become a member today!

 5| Offers:  

• Certified Organic (OCIA-ECOCERT-rainforest alliance) Arabica High grown from Chiapas, Mexico Anywhere in continental USA & Canada at USD 295.00 per 150 lbs bag (1 bags minimum)
• Bulk roasted coffee inquire with us! US $1.50 lb in continental US for full truck load.
• Bulk instant agglomerated or spray dried CIF Europe, Asia main port USD 3.50 per kilos

...More to come in the next bulletin...

Caravan Trade is member of the Québec Association of Export Trading Houses  (AMCEQ).
For more information please contact Caravan Trade:

116 West service road, pmb 358
Champlain, New York
12919
USA

Tel: 514-387-9009 
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E-mail: kmd@caravantrade.biz