Mexico - Oaxaca: Pompilio Garcia Luna

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Producer: Pompilio Garcia Luna

Origin: San Vicente Yogondoy, Sierra Sur, Oaxaca, Mexico

Tasting Notes: Graham Cracker, Sweet Orange, Buttery

Varietals: Pluma

Altitude: 1500 - 1700 masl

Process: Washed

12 oz Whole Bean Coffee

The coffee farmers in Sierra Sur, Oaxaca produce coffee that is widely appealing despite people's varying taste preferences. This coffee is chug-able everyday with its graham crackers sweetness, subtle citrus brightness, and buttery texture.

Notes from our partners at Red Fox:

Pompilio Garcia Luna heads a key producer group in San Vicente Yogondoy, a lush, densely forested community in the Sierra Sur region of Oaxaca in the district of Pochutla. Getting to that position took almost a decade of effort, dedication, and hope.

When his journey toward leadership began in the mid 2010s, the coffee producers in Yogondoy were in a state of disenfranchisement and economic distress. At that time, they could only sell their coffees to corrupt cooperatives, receiving prices far lower than those offered in other areas and far lower than they needed to thrive. This dynamic was so entrenched that many producers lost faith that coffee could be a profitable business—Pompilio's family among them.

At the time, Pompilio didn’t grow coffee. He worked harvesting stone and minerals for construction—also a low-profit business, but options were very limited in Yogondoy.

Seeing the desperate situation for coffee producers in Yogondoy, Pompilio decided to cultivate his first hectares of the Pluma variety, but only with a radical change to the way he would sell his (and his neighbors’) coffee. Thinking that the only way to gain better customers was to go find them and show them the excellent quality that Yogondoy had potential for, he embarked on a journey to do just that.

Since Pompilio speaks mostly Zapotec and little Spanish, he sent his nephew Lalo to a fair in Oaxaca, where he met us. We were lucky to learn his family and community’s history and impetus to improve their harvests. We also got to try our first samples. Since then we’ve built a strong bond with Yogondoy’s producers and the Garcia family, helping them access better prices and more competitive markets. The relationship is built on a foundation of trust and traceability.

Now, when we visit Pompilio, we have this long history to look back on while eating his wife’s delicious food and drinking the mezcal that accompanies each meal. 

San Vicente Yogondoy’s excellence is no surprise once you’ve been there. Its steep slopes harbor coffee under a thick canopy of native shade facing the Pacific Ocean to the south and receiving very distinct rainy and dry seasons with cooling Pacific breezes.

Getting to San Vicente Yogondoy from Oaxaca takes approximately 5 hours via road. That road is in good condition, so the real challenge is getting from the town of Yogondoy out to the farms. Unlike many other producing areas where producers live on their farms, Yogondoy’s producers usually live in the central town with their farms only reachable by 2-3 hours on foot or mule. During harvest, producing families usually stay in temporary housing on the farms and move their coffee by mule or on foot over the course of several trips to the city.

Yogondoy’s indigenous Zapotec traditions and language are alive and well. In Zapotec, Yogondoy means "River of Bees," and many local farmers keep beehives for honey and pollination alongside their coffee. Many of the farmers in this group have younger coffee trees that were planted in the last 5 years and continue the tradition of maintaining almost 100% of the Pluma variety, a local mutation of Typica that has grown here for over 80 years. It thrives in these conditions, soil, and climate, producing spectacular cup quality. Many of the farmers are also under 30 years old, an encouraging fact showing that coffee has a future here. However, a percentage of young people are also migrating to the capital in search of better opportunities.

Another tradition still very present in the Zapotec community in the area is the practice of Tequio (a word from the Nahuatl language that means work or tribute), a practice of communal workshare that comes into play during harvest and in off-season renovations.

Yogondoy has a high level of plant diversity on the coffee farms compared to other coffee-growing areas. Local producers use native trees such as Cuachepil, Cuil, and/or avocado to shade their coffee trees. These trees provide not only shade, but also various benefits such as food, ornamentation, medicine, construction materials, and water collection. For instance, the Cuil has leaf litter that adds a rich fertilizer to the soil.

The farms usually keep a distance of 2 meters between rows and 1.5 meters between seedlings. Between each row, producers usually place a plant that serves to separate the rows and keep the coffee trees apart.

Yogondoy is one of the few communities in which we see a year on year increase in both yield and quality. The producers here have invested a lot in their crops for 8 years, leading to production between 1000-2000 kg per hectare of dry parchment—nearly double that of many other Mexican coffee-growing areas.