Coffee farm visit in Veracruz: what Don Miguel showed us

Don Miguel walked us up a gravel drive, under a cream arch dotted with red, with a dog trotting ahead of him. That was the start of our coffee farm visit in Veracruz, and before we had seen a single drying bed he was already talking about what makes Veracruz coffee, and Mexican coffee as a whole, what it is.

The question I keep asking myself on these trips is simple: who got us in, and what was only explained once we were there? The first half has an easy answer. Don Miguel did. It was his farm, and he opened the gate. This post is about the second half.

Walking onto the farm with Don Miguel

Our trip took us through the coffee hills around Xico and its neighbouring towns. From the road you mostly see green: shade trees, banana leaves, stone walls soft with moss.

Don Miguel talked while he walked. He wore a green cap and a checked shirt, and he kept stopping to point at things. At one tree next to the path he reached up into the branches, and so did I, to look at the cherries. They were still small, hard and green, weeks away from being picked.

I had come to look at coffee. He started with history.

What makes Mexican coffee really Mexican

He wanted us to understand what makes the coffee of Mexico really the coffee of Mexico, and went back to the Spanish, who conquered Mexico and, as he told it, brought coffee with them. Coffee did not start here. It arrived, and the land had to make room for it.

Before coffee, he said, this land was used for tobacco, fruits, nuts and other things. And it still is. I had pictured a coffee farm as coffee from fence to fence. What I saw was a mix, with coffee growing between other plants and under taller trees.

Before the trip I had read about Veracruz coffee and where it sits in the country, but reading did not prepare me for how mixed the land actually looks when you stand in it.

A 3D map and the sea

In a room lined with dark wooden cabinets, Don Miguel stood next to a 3D map of Mexico. You could run your fingers over the mountains. He used it to show us why the land here is so good.

His explanation came down to one thing: it is so close to the sea. On the map you could see how quickly the ground climbs from the coast into the mountains. I am repeating this as I understood it, not as a scientist. Air coming off the water carries moisture, the mountains push it up, and the slopes stay green and damp. Coffee likes that kind of place.

Drying beds and learning every year

He also showed us what they do on the farm itself. The part he talked about most was drying. After picking, the coffee has to dry before it can be stored, shipped and roasted. How that happens changes what ends up in the cup, and it is easy to get wrong.

On the farm of Don Miguel they work with drying beds: usually raised frames, where the coffee lies in a thin layer with air moving around it. What stayed with me was not the beds themselves but the way he talked about them. They try to improve and learn every year. Each season is a chance to change one thing and see what happens.

That is not a story you get from a label. It made me think about how knowledge moves between farms, which we looked at before in a post on coffee cooperatives in Mexico, and about growers like the one in this profile of a Coatepec coffee grower.

What one visit can and cannot tell you

I left with amazing insights, and I want to be careful with them. A visit shows you a farm on one day. It does not show you a bad harvest, a very wet year, or how a season really ends. Looking is not the same as knowing a farm.

What it did give us was a better question: how could we support coffee farmers and help them with infrastructure? Drying beds are a good example of what that word means in practice. I do not have the answer yet. I do think it is the right question to keep asking whenever we talk about coffee sourcing.

Next time you open a bag of coffee from Mexico, look for a line about how it was dried. If there is nothing, notice that. Somebody spent a whole season learning to get that part right.

This farm doesn't supply Santo; we went there to learn.