Our second year buying coffee from Mexican processing legend Enrique Eduardo Lopez Aguilar and his farm Finca Chelin. In his own words: "I love to be innovative. For more than 12 years I have enjoyed discovering different flavour notes and sensory attributes in the same coffee, which is only achieved by trying different methods of washed, honey and natural processing, as well as experimenting with variations of these same processes".

We were very fortunate to meet Enrique (virtually) at a cupping organised by the importer Raw Material with their in-country partner Red Beetle. Enrique told us a story about the farm name: "This Finca was founded in 1896 and was one of the first on Candelaria-Loxicha municipality to grow coffee. My grandparents from my mother side were form Candelaria and they were coffee growers too since 1913 with Finca La Oaxaqueña where my mother was born. My mother´s name was Graciela, it is a tradition to call the women with this name “Chela”, and my grandfather that was Spaniard, when my mother was a little girl, he called her “Chelin” like "small Chela". In May 2012 I purchased this Finca named Tierra Colorada, but to honour my mother memories, I called it Finca Chelin".

This year we opted for Enrique's Black Honey processed Gesha. The way that honeys are processed and named at Chelin is a little different to most honey processing nomenclature. Rather than simply removing varying amounts of mucilage for black, red, and white honeys, Enrique removes the same amount of mucilage across all honeys regardless of ‘colour’.

For this Black Honey the coffee firstly undergoes 2 days of Carbonic Maceration fermentation in cherry, then the next morning they are pulped and immediately taken to the patio to begin drying for 3 days in direct sunlight. After this they are moved to another patio with shade for another 25 days.

The ripeness of the cherry and the amount of sun in the first days of drying (after the coffee is dry pulped) both affect how the mucilage oxidises on the beans and thus the final appearance of the coffee, so even though the green beans look very clean like a washed coffee they are the black honey process- this should be apparent in cupping. The washed Gesha would show very traditional Gesha notes of jasmine and grapefruit while the black honey should have more tropical sweetness and complexity. We found exactly this with this Black Honey: Pineapple tropical notes and a demerara sugar sweetness.

Each of Oaxaca’s seven coffee producing regions has a different microclimate, but all have ideal conditions to grow and produce excellent coffees. Oaxaca has a very mountainous geography, mainly through the Sierra Madre del Sur, and thousands of hectares, which Enrique describes as “fog forest”: dense, plentiful land with a magical appeal as fog creeps over hilltops in the mornings and evenings. The majority of coffees are cultivated at 1000 metres above sea level, but there are places that cultivate coffee higher than 1500 metres above sea level. The region is home to many smallholder farmers and producers that share one or two hectares of land, and many produce “extraordinary coffees”, including Enrique’s own Finca Chelín.