As part of our new coffee program, Peter Giuliano of Counter Culture Coffee offered to explain a little bit about each of these four new coffees we’re bringing on. Of course, I said “of course!”. His first installment described “La Golondrina” Guarapamba coffee. This installment describes Oaxaca La Trindad coffee, which is matched (natch) with our Oaxacan chocolate ice cream.

My first trip to visit the La Trinidad Cooperative in Oaxaca was in 2001, and was one of my first real adventures into one of the remote places where great coffees come from. To get to Los Naranjos, the most accessible of the three villages that makes up La Trinidad (the Trinity) cooperative, you have to take a small plane from Oaxaca to the coastal town of Huatulco (near Puerto Escondido), and then drive about 8 hours into the mountains. It’s hard driving, up and down mountains, through jungle valleys, across rivers, and up and over more mountains. Once you pass Pluma Hidalgo, the famous high-jungle-coffee-village, you go onto dirt roads, and you’ve got only 2 hours to go. That first year, while traversing a cliff on a narrow dirt road, we came across a giant pile of dirt, completely blocking the road for some reason. There was no turning around, and no passing the dirt pile, so we had no choice but to start digging.

A few hours later we were in Los Naranjos. It’s an amazing place, perched atop one of the peaks of Mexico’s Sierra Madre del Sur mountain range. It’s very remote there; villagers had just chipped in to buy their first vehicle (a pickup truck) with proceeds from the previous year’s coffee crop (which I had purchased at a high price, due to its amazing quality). They had to improve the roads to accommodate the truck, which explained the pile of dirt. The leaders of the co-operative, who hail from three different communities in the surrounding mountains, had gathered there to greet me. To my surprise, the first order of business was to try and resolve the giant communications problem we faced: due to the extreme remoteness, only one person spoke Spanish, the rest spoke dialects of the indigenous Mistec language. In fact, the Mistec speakers had a tough time communicating with each other, since the isolated villages had different dialects themselves!

We struggled through a meal of fish caught in a local stream, tortillas from corn grown on the mountain above the village, and beans grown on the mountain below the village. We finished with homemade mescal and coffee. By the next morning, I was filled with admiration for this co-operative and their struggle to cultivate the highest-quality coffee possible using traditional indigenous methods. I became friends with Lazaro (the guy who spoke Spanish), and he became my guide to the coffee and the traditions of the area. I’ve bought coffee from La Trinidad every year since.

The coffee is grown on small family farms, fermented, washed and dried on the farm, and collected in the center of town for hand-sorting and aging in their adobe warehouse. It’s then brought down the mountain for bagging and export. The whole process is incredibly labor-intensive, and steeped in the coffee traditions of this area. One of the reasons the coffee is so great is the craftsmanship and skill that goes into the coffee process. The other reason is that, because of the remote locale, they are still growing the coffee varietal that is the most direct descendant of the coffee plant first brought to Latin America, called Typica. Great Typicas have a chocolate-cherry-vanilla flavor that is intoxicating and transporting.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about this coffee is its dominant flavor of spiced chocolate, almost exactly like the flavor of Oaxacan chocolate. Now, as you might know, chocolate is indigenous to these very mountains, and the chocolate produced in the city of Oaxaca (like Mayordomo) is particularly famous. Is it a coincidence that the coffee and the chocolate taste the same? Or is it an amazing trans-species example of terroir? We’ll never know, but it’s perfect for pairing with Oaxacan Chocolate Ice Cream. Oaxacalicious.