A Word about our I-Marks

I-mark is short for Intelligentsia marks. Our I-marks are the distinctive and evocative names we have chosen for the single-origin lots we source from each of the countries on our menu. The I-mark names are carefully chosen to convey the essence of how our overall approach to Direct Trade is adapted to meet the challenges and seize the opportunities we see in each country where we work. They evoke something distinctive about each one of those origins. And they are a signal of the meticulous process of curation behind every coffee labeled with one of our I-marks.

We subscribe to the belief that a coffee’s quality frontier is determined primarily at origin by the interplay of three factors: the coffee variety, the growing environment and the toil of farmers and workers. But that doesn’t mean we have nothing to do with it. Our approach to sourcing, quality control and roasting is exhaustive, and our appetite for data is insatiable. We seek information and actionable insight all along the coffee chain, and work tirelessly to leverage what we learn to coax as much complexity, flavor and sweetness as we can from the green coffee we buy. When we approve a specific lot for release under our I-marks, it is our guarantee that lot has met our high standards and represents the very best that origin has to offer for that crop year.

For more on our I-marks, listen to this episode of our Buyers Notebook podcast.

La Perla de Oaxaca: Intelligentsia’s Direct Trade Program in Mexico

Our sourcing efforts in Mexico have focused exclusively on the southern state of Oaxaca, whose rugged terrain and elevated cultural and culinary expressions make it a perennial favorite for anthropologists, artists, gastronomes, mystics and travelers seeking inspiration.

The area that is today Oaxaca once sat at the northern edge of the Maya civilization and the southern boundary of the great cultures of the Valley of Mexico, where the Aztecs came to rule. Since its inception, its art and architecture, food and folkways have blended the best of those influences with the best of its indigenous traditions in unique and unforgettable creations that are unmistakable Oaxacan.

Today, nearly one in every three oaxaqueños speaks an indigenous language, more than in any other Mexican state. Half of those people don’t speak Spanish at all, only their mother tongues. They are Zapotecos, Mixtecos, Mixes, Cuicatecos and a half-dozen other nationalities, all maintaining the proud traditions of their forebears in hundreds of villages scattered throughout Oaxaca’s mountains. The Sierra Madre range that connects the United States with Central America runs northwest-to-southeast along Mexico’s arched western flank and splits in Oaxaca’s coffeelands into distinct ranges: the Sierra Sur, which rises dramatically out of the Pacific Ocean to the south, the Sierra Mixe and Sierra Mixteca to the northwest and the Sierra Mazateca to the northeast; The region’s unforgiving terrain has been a bulwark that has kept the forces of cultural dilution at bay and helped these communities safeguard their cultures, customs and cuisines.

In the capital city, these traditions find expression in art and architecture that have made Oaxaca famous, and in the food that led UNESCO to put traditional Mexican cuisine on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The food carts on Oaxaca’s streetsides and the elegant restaurants that line its ancient plazas serve layered moles, local salsas and heirloom varieties of corn that can’t be found anywhere else.

This is the Oaxaca that has been evoked by novelists, channeled by painters, interpreted by chefs, and enjoyed by everyone for ages.

Against this backdrop, we work with a small number of partners every year to sift through countless coffees in search of the sweetest, most pristine lots available. Each year we present limited runs culled from these selections as a series of microlots under the La Perla de Oaxaca mark.

Finca Chelìn

Successful coffee farmers possess a clear vision, unrelenting determination, and an appetite for risk. Enrique López Aguilar needed all three attributes when he purchased Finca Chelín a decade years ago.

Originally founded in 1896, the farm sits at an elevation of 1,700 meters in the rugged Sierra Sur mountain range in the state of Oaxaca. When Enrique first stepped foot on the property, no one had lived or worked the farm in almost a decade, vines covered the 30 year-old Pluma and Mundo Novo coffee plants, the roads were in disrepair, and the washing station was crumbling.

Enrique’s vision for Finca Chelín was simple: produce the best Mexican coffee in an environmentally friendly manner. The microlots coming out of Finca Chelín for the past few years prove that Enrique has achieved his vision. His success can be traced back to three crucial decisions he made nine years ago.

First, Enrique decided to “do no harm” to the environment when he rebuilt the farm. Even though it would have been easier to use fertilizers and herbicides to bring the coffee trees back to life, Enrique employed more expensive and more time-consuming organic practices. He did not cut down any of the hardwood and fruit trees that shade the coffee, leaving a natural sanctuary for birds and other animals. As a result, Finca Chelín is a carbon-neutral undertaking that has preserved the forests that sequester carbon, recharge aquifers and provide a habitat teeming with wildlife.

Second, Enrique supplemented the heirloom varieties that already existed on the farm with several other high quality varietals, including Geisha. The Geisha variety is known to be more tolerant than other traditional cultivars of coffee leaf rust, a disease currently decimating producers in Oaxaca, and for producing stunning cup quality when grown under the right conditions.

Third, Enrique attacked coffee processing with extraordinary zeal. Each time we visit the farm, Enrique is running dozens of new processing experiments on fermentation, washing, and drying.

We are fortunate to work with farmers like Enrique. What he has done with Finca Chelín in nine short years is stunning and inspiring. Given his vision, determination, and appetite for risk, we expect to be offering you his superlative coffees for many years to come.

CEPCO

For more than a quarter-century, CEPCO has been creating a reliable path to the marketplace for thousands of smallholder growers throughout Oaxaca. Its members are diverse. They come from every coffee-growing region of Oaxaca. They represent every indigenous group in the state. They speak different languages and wear different traditional dress. But there is more that unites them than divides them: a tireless work ethic, a relentless commitment to organic farming and biodiversity conservation, a fierce belief in collective action, and a stubborn faith in coffee as a vehicle of community development.

CEPCO was formed by leaders of popular movements in Oaxaca who were pressing for political and social change in a society marked by wrenching economic inequality and persistent marginalization of poor and indigenous people. They saw in coffee, the dominant livelihood for most of the state’s poorest people, the most powerful point of leverage for social organization, collective action and progressive change.

Its leaders are unlikely capitalists, but they have presided over a long period of successful engagement with Fair Trade and organic markets in Europe and the United States. CEPCO’s success in creating market opportunities and securing price premiums for its members during the early 2000s, in the wake of a collapse in the global coffee market price, was instrumental in keeping Oaxaca’s coffee culture viable during a very difficult stretch.

Since then, the risks of coffee farming have only increased, both in the field and in the marketplace. The outbreak of coffee leaf rust during the 2013/14 crop year posed a mortal threat to the region’s coffee sector, and while we have never returned to the low prices of the 2001 crisis, prices have been volatile than ever over the past decade and bear little relation to the costs of production. While CEPCO is helping its members mitigate these risks, it is also positioning them to seize new opportunities.

The specialty marketplace has expanded and matured since CEPCO was founded a generation ago, and quality standards are infinitely more rigorous. CEPCO understands that being competitive in today’s market requires more investment in cup quality than ever before, and we are collaborating to help the organization generate social returns on its investments in coffee quality.

Today, our work with CEPCO is focused on balancing the incentives for individual achievement that are central to Intelligentsia’s Direct Trade model with the values of equality and collective action that are central to CEPCO’s mission. We believe that the greatest opportunities for smallholder farmers to participate in the benefits of specialty coffee lie here, at the intersection of market incentives for quality-based differentiation and social commitment to collective action. Our La Perla Organic Mexico tests our belief that social inclusion and extraordinary flavor are not mutually exclusive.