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Coffee travels in Mexico
It is hard to get a good cup of coffee in Mexico.
Coffee roaster Mike Mallow displays unroasted coffee beans scooped from a bag. Mallow recently traveled to Mexico to learn about how coffee beans are grown and brought to market.
“In the mountains, they boiled water on a wood-stove and threw the coffee in,” Mike Mallow said. “It was like cowboy coffee.”
It was quite an adjustment for a coffee aficionado used to drinking coffee brewed one cup at a time.
Used to coffee made with water heated in an espresso machine and poured over ground beans roasted within the last week.
Used to a brew a world away from cowboy coffee.
In fact it was a world away, in the mountains of Mexico’s Nayarit province, that Mallow — owner of Twin Lakes Java and a shoo-in for the title of Copper Country’s most particular coffee drinker — encountered cowboy coffee.
“It tasted like smokey water,” Mallow said.
Mallow was there for seven days, from Feb. 21 to 27, “to learn how coffee is actually processed and graded, what’s involved in getting coffee to the market.”
He spent time in mountain villages like Tepic, north of Porta Vallarta, where tan coffee beans dried piled in long rows in the sun and villagers built a pavilion and played music to honor their guests.
It was an eco-tourism trip hosted by Cafe Sustainables, a dry mill and co-op that processes organic coffee in the region. Mallow was one of a small group of coffee roasters from New York, Michigan, Wisconsin and Washington State who went on the trip.
They learned about how coffee is graded, a complicated process.
“It isn’t like a lemon or a tomato or something that you pick off a vine or tree and you put it in a truck and haul it,” Mallow said.
It starts with harvesting beans. Those beans are dumped in water. Beans that float are not ripe and are rejected.
Beans that pass the float test are dried in the sun, if they haven’t already been dried on the vine. Then beans are run through a set of screens and graded based on size and the among of defects in the beans.
A sample from each crop is taken to a tasting room.
“Before they sell the coffee, they have to cup it,” Mallow said.
In the “cupping” process, sample beans from the different crops are roasted and brewed and poured into a bunch of coffee cups on a table in a room at the co-op. These brews are tasted and judged on aroma and flavor.
Based on those judgments, unroasted beans from different crops get blended in various proportions. Those proportions are a major determining factor in the flavor of the coffee once it gets roasted back in the States.
“And once they’ve blended it, they’ll cup it again and then they’ll market it,” Mallow said.
In addition to learning about how coffee comes to market, the roasters were there to show the farmers that American coffee buyers are willing to pay a premium for well-grown coffee beans.
“It was to connect the growers to the buyers to give a face to that,” Mallow said.
“So they would understand their quality was appreciated.”
Part of Cafe Sustainables’ goal in Mexico is to encourage sustainable agriculture. This includes promoting both organic growing and crop rotation.
“They’ll plant lemons, they’ll plant limes, they’ll plant limons, which look like a lemon but they’re not,” Mallow said.
The beans get shipped to the U.S. and elsewhere. Roasters like Mallow roast them, grind them, make coffee out of them.
Ideally, that coffee tastes a sight better than cowboy coffee.
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