Coffee of the Week: Santiago Atitlán, Mexico

Starting Monday, Highwire will feature our newest single origin offering in all of our retail stores. This coffee comes from the community of Santiago Atitlán in the Mexican state of Oaxaca.  

Santiago Atitlán is about 100 miles to the north and west of the city of Oaxaca on winding, sometime treacherous roads. The producers of this coffee are part of the indigenous Mixe people who live in this region. Coffee is their main source of income, though they also grow corn, beans, peppers and tomatoes.  

The climate in this part of Oaxaca is more affected by the weather coming from the gulf rather than the Pacific. As a result, it's extremely wet in this area for most of the year with lots a rain and misty cloud cover. This helps slow the maturation process of the coffee, which tends to improve flavor, but it makes drying very difficult.  

Our friends at Red Fox Coffee Merchants sourced this coffee and they shared that coffee from this area is typically sold to roving coffee buyers that show up with a truck, pay cash, and haul away the harvest. Looking for an opportunity to make more money for their crop, and encouraged by an agronomist that recognized their potential, the producers of Sierra Atitlán organized their own transportation and delivered this coffee to the Red Fox dry mill in Oaxaca.  

Through Red Fox, Highwire has featured coffees from Oaxaca before (some of you might remember the San Lucas Zoquiapam from around this time last year) and when it came to tasting selections from this region this year, the Santiago Atitlán jumped off the table.  The intense aromatics of this coffee seem more like something you'd find in Kenya. And while the acidity plays a big part in the flavor, it's more tropical than citric, with a creamy body that softens the intensity and elevates the sweetness. 

We will be pouring this coffee all week in our stores. We only have three sacks of green coffee to roast, so supply of this coffee will be very limited!

Are you a fan of Highwire's single origin selections? Then you should check out our Single Origin Subscription! The coffee offered through the subscription will change every couple of weeks in conjunction with every new single origin coffee of the week. The subscription is a great deal starting at 10-20% off of the retail price, jumping to 20-30% off after 10 deliveries (based on frequency).