Mexico Chiapas Bellavista SHG/EP 2023 - Medium

Chiapas Bellavista Washed Green Coffee Beans

When leaf rust devastated Mexico’s coffee farms in 2012 the industry struggled to rebuild coffee production and the livelihoods of smallholder farmers that were hit the hardest. Importers and farmers worked together to design programs to overhaul coffee-growing conditions. The goal: develop sustainable production practices to position coffee as the main economic driver in coffee regions.

New programs gave smallholders in Bellavista, Chiapas access to healthy seedlings, high-quality fertilizer, financing, and purchase guarantees. In addition, farmers benefited from technical and agricultural assistance. Today, Bellavista’s growers are part of a network of thousands of producers who have collectively renewed over 5,000 hectares of farmland in Mexico.

The municipality of Frontera in Mexico’s Chiapas region, where Bellavista sits at 1,600-1,850masl, borders Guatemala’s Huehuetenango department. The area shares the same microclimate that produces exceptional cup profiles. Farmers here employ traditional processing methods like hand de-pulping, wooden-tank fermentation, and patio sun-drying.

This Strictly High Grown (SHG) unroasted green coffee blends Bourbon, Caturra, and Catuai varietals. The coffee cherries were hand-depulped, washed and fully sundried yielding a green coffee with buttery, brown-sugar sweetness and bright citric acidity. During dry milling, the lot was further sorted to European Preparation (EP) specifications with a minimum screen size of 15 and above and a maximum of eight defects within 300 grams.