Mexico Nayarita

ALMOST DARK ROAST
10oz. whole bean coffee
Washed process

Flavor
Smooth and balanced. Roasted nuts and bakers chocolate tones with some smokey notes. Great with cream and sugar!

Info
Gathered around an extinct volcano, Cerro San Juan, a committed group of 260 cooperative coffee farmers are working together to produce some of the best coffee in Mexico. Terruño Nayarita coffees come from heirloom trees. The word Terruño means homestead in Spanish, and these are farmers that take great pride in their coffee. The plots are tiny, averaging around 2.5 hectares against a national average of 3.5, and they add up to roughly 650 hectares of shade grown coffee on the steep volcanic slopes west of Tepic. This Inglaterra lot sits at an average altitude of 994 meters on volcanic soil.

The varietal mix runs about 50 percent Caturra, 25 percent Catuai, 18 percent Criollo, which is what Typica is called around here, and 8 percent Mundo Novo. Most of these growers have built simple wet mills onto the roofs of their houses or into the hillside and let gravity do part of the work, so the coffee cherry is depulped and fermented right on the farm instead of being trucked off the mountain. Final drying, milling, sorting and bagging happen at the group’s centralized dry mill, and every bag leaves with a barcode on it: each batch is a single micro lot from one specific picking day, usually with beans from only two or three farms. The group also runs its own quality lab, FincaLab, where growers roast and cup their own coffee and see for themselves how a processing decision shows up in the cup. This one scored between 83 and 85 points on the Q scale, at the top of what we see from this group.

San Cristobal Coffee Importers takes great care to find and produce excellent coffee, making sure farmers use safe, sustainable shade techniques and provide a fair wage to the workers.