COOP Grown/Biosphere Friendly

In the Chiapas region of southern Mexico, close to the border of Guatemala, stretches a 300,000 acre wilderness area known as El Triunfo Biosphere Reserve. Home to many and diverse species of trees and wildlife, El Triunfo is a vast landscape of rainforest and cloudforest ecosytstems.

For the last 12 years, the area around El Triunfo has also been home to the members of CESMACH, or Campesinos Ecologicos de la Sierra Madre de Chiapas. Officially formed in 1994, Cesmach began as a small cooperative of coffee-farming families determined to get out from under the thumb of larger coffee brokers, high interest rates, financial despair, and other intermediaries in order to market their coffee directly and to use the income to support their community.

When it started, the cooperative s members numbered only eight families. Today that number has risen to 204.

The goal of Cesmach s members is to create better communities, stimulate the local economy, improve conditions for their families and neighbors, and to help preserve the flora and fauna of El Triunfo. For more information on this cooperative s efforts, and the land they are working to protect, visit their website at www.cesmach.com.mx (you can translate the original Spanish into English via a link on the first page, but prepare yourself for a rather bumpy translation).

This is the first time I have purchased an Organic Mexican offering from this coffee cooperative, and after two or three cuppings I am duly impressed. Our new Fair Trade Organic Mexican coffee will beguile your sense of smell with a fresh, sweet aroma laden with hints of nutmeg and cinnamon.

This coffee will then please your palate as its soft, well-rounded body immerses your tongue in the warm flavors of mild chocolate and ever so subtle earthiness, ending with a pleasant, lingering finish.