Mexico - San Antonio Honey

The Story Villa Talea de Castro sits four hours from the state capital of Oaxaca, deep in the Sierra Norte, one of the most biodiverse regions in Mexico. The area gets over 1,500mm of rainfall across eight months of the year, temperatures stay mild, and the landscape is dense and alive. Getting coffee out is a different story. Every access route involves winding roads, half paved, half dirt, which makes harvest season a real logistical challenge for producers moving coffee from farm to collection point. This lot comes from Nomeil Velasco at Finca San Antonio, grown at 1,550 meters in the Talea de Castro community. The variety is Typica, one of the oldest arabica varieties in the world and the genetic backbone of much of Latin American coffee history. It's also one of the more demanding varieties to grow. Typica produces lower yields than modern cultivars and is more vulnerable to disease, which is part of why so many producers have moved away from it. The ones who haven't tend to know exactly what they're working with. In the right conditions, Typica produces a cup with a distinctly delicate structure, bright and clean with a sweetness. Nomeil processed this lot using a traditional honey method. After harvest, ripe cherries ferment for six hours before pulping, then spend another 24 hours fermenting in parchment. The coffee then dries slowly on patios and azoteas, rooftop drying beds common in Oaxacan coffee communities, with the mucilage left intact on the bean. That layer of fruit sugar breaks down gradually over the drying period, contributing a natural sweetness and body to the cup that a fully washed coffee won't have. It's a process that rewards patience and attention, and one that suits both the variety and the climate here well.