Andrea Feria Garcia's Bourbon 🇲🇽

• Muscadine Grape
• Honeysuckle

Variety

• Bourbon

Processing Method

• Fermented for 48 hours in wooden tanks
• Dried for 10 to 14 days on raised beds

Santa María Yucuhiti, Oaxaca, Mexico (1850-masl)

Sourced by Red Fox Coffee Merchants

Andrea Feria Garcia produces coffee in Oaxaca’s Guadalupe Miramar community, within the Santa Maria Yucuhiti municipality of the Mixteca province’s Tlaxiaco district. Her 2-hectare farm Loma Bonita is planted with Bourbon and Typica varieties and is located 15 minutes from the center of the community. She is the mother of Angel Castro, Leonides Castro, and Hipolito Castro, who are also Red Fox coffee producers in the Guadalupe area. Andrea's coffee is one of the finest coffees collected in the Miramar area. She owes this achievement to the constant effort she puts into the farm every day as well as to the more than 30 years of experience she has in coffee cultivation. Andrea speaks Spanish and Mixteco.

Andrea has her own processing station at home. She ferments her coffee for 48 hours in wooden tanks, then dries it for 10 to 14 days on raised beds. Andrea usually keeps a distance of 2 meters between rows and 1.5 meters between seedlings. Between each row, she places a plant that serves to separate the rows and keep the coffee trees apart. Her farm, like the rest in her community, is small enough that family and communal labor is enough for the coffee harvest. Like many others, she uses coffee pulp for fertilizer. Andrea uses native trees such as ice cream bean trees and pines to shade their coffee trees. These trees provide not only shade, but also various benefits such as food, ornamentation, medicine, construction materials, nitrogen fixing, and water retention.

To get to Guadalupe Miramar we first travel the highway from Oaxaca for 5 hours, the last half hour of which are dirt roads. The coffee farms are located near the center of the community, about a 20-minute walk. One great advantage here is that the farms are so close to the highway, meaning that, unlike many neighboring communities, Guadalupe Miramar’s don’t need mules to transport their coffee. The Guadalupe area was dominated by a single cooperative until 2018, when a group of producers from the area sought new markets where they could differentiate their coffees by quality and improve their profits. During this search, they found the Red Fox Mexico team.

We tasted lots of samples and calibrated, making our first purchase that year. Since then, we’ve worked hand in hand with the producers in the area, providing specific, timely, and high-quality feedback and supporting them to improve both quality and quantity. Currently, the producers in the community have organized themselves strategically, electing a steering committee and its leaders annually. When asked if they would ever want to form a cooperative, they affirmed that they plan to continue working as they do now: a well-organized and democratic community of coffee producers.