There are few companies as close to coffee as Cafeología. In southern Mexico, they work directly with producers, roast, taste, act as baristas, and share their knowledge at the coffee school. Jesús Salazar's team has created a coffee island that can be groundbreaking for the entire coffee industry. Details, precision, and patience characterize Cafeología's work. We visited them on site.
While "cafeology" as a specific field doesn't exist, it quickly becomes clear what it aims to be: the entirety of what makes coffee coffee. It's a holistic approach to a subject that encompasses production, processing, and consumption. "Cafeología" dedicates itself to this grand goal as a company, stating that "harmony between the environment, families, and quality is paramount."
Cafeología's motto: We create the human, economic, and material conditions to express the maximum potential of coffee and those who made it.
What exactly does Cafeología do?
Many people who come into contact with Cafeología do so via social media. The company's and Jesús's (Cafeólogo) Instagram accounts are a stylishly curated diary of their work. The first physical touchpoint is probably their cafes, with their headquarters in San Cristóbal being particularly noteworthy, as well as a small shop at Tuxtla airport. At their headquarters in San Cristóbal, they operate a coffee roastery and a coffee school, where they train employees, coffee professionals, and interested individuals.
On the roof, they have a drying facility for coffee cherries. Outside the city, they operate a dry mill where they hull, sort, clean, and manually remove defects from coffee, then export green coffee, mainly to Europe. In the region around San Cristóbal, they work in four indigenous communities, where they manage their own beneficios and offer workshops on quality optimization to producers. This broad and diverse work has developed over the past ten years.
A look inside the dry mill, where coffees are manually sorted.
In the autumn of 2022, I was on-site in San Cristóbal, having been in contact with Jesús for three years and having bought two Natural Nano-Lots from Pedro Vásquez. I was excitedly nervous. Cafeología's media presence is impressive and sets high expectations.
The Cafeología Café
At the café, I met Pablo Salazar, who manages the finances. The café itself is a mix of 70s architecture with a lot of wood, high ceilings, many plants, and subtle colors. The place itself exudes tranquility and invites you to have several cups of coffee. The baristas are well-trained and take their time with the extractions.
Cafeología's flagship café in San Cristóbal
For filter coffees, guests choose between coffees with different scores. The 85-point coffees are the baseline, followed by 86 and 87-point coffees. The 85-point coffees offer a lot of balance, a soft texture, and a lot of sweetness. The even higher scores become more floral, more fruity, and increasingly less like the classic coffee taste.
“It's all about the details,” says Pablo.
He is the company's CFO, having only discovered coffee a few years ago when his brother Jesús convinced him to join the project. "If we want to communicate details in coffee, we have to look at it in detail." Details - a word that would accompany me during my days in San Cristóbal.
Pablo Salazar, Cafeología
There were the specially designed coffee cups that concentrated the aroma, making it stronger. There was the soap made from coffee by-products in the room, there was the calibration in the language of all employees, how they described the coffees. There was the same music in all rooms, there were the labeled cupping cups in the laboratory, and there was the same high-quality coffee, no matter who brewed it.
The Roastery
Right next to the café, Claudia and her team operate the roastery. They roast on a 15kg Giesen roaster. They roast one curve per coffee variety. The filter coffee roast curve is their starting point; for espresso, they follow the same curve but roast a little longer. They now roast almost 30 tons for their own use. They serve five Cafeología cafés, sell on-site and in their online shop, and several coffee shops in Mexico itself serve their coffee.
A look into Cafeología's roastery.
The awareness and consumption of local coffee in Mexico are significantly higher than in other coffee-producing countries. At Buna in Mexico City, for example, guests choose between different coffee regions, and only then the farm. It's essentially like what we know from wine.
The Coffee School and Laboratory
Claudia also manages the adjacent laboratory, where daily tastings take place. Claudia also judges at the Cup of Excellence, the most prestigious competition for a country's best coffees. The tastings with Claudia and the team were very valuable, as they allowed us to calibrate.
We wanted to learn from each other how we think, talk, and feel about coffees. This helps us all to communicate more precisely in the future and for Cafeología to find the exact coffees we are looking for.
Cafeología's Cupping Lab
We tasted coffees from three zones around San Cristóbal. Cafeología's focus is on washed and cherry-fermented and dry-processed coffees. Carlos is responsible for post-harvest processes, with whom I had a long conversation about fermentations and drying.
Carlos is responsible for the entire post-harvest process.
However, Carlos didn't speak of drying, but of "dehydration" - that is, water removal. It seems like a detail, but that's precisely the point. The method, speed, temperature, and sunlight exposure during water removal from coffee have a massive impact on taste and shelf life.
Drying on the roof
Right outside my room, the first drying beds were already set up. Where in other houses there would be a balcony to sunbathe and drink a glass of wine, Carlos and his team dry coffee cherries. A dream for every coffee lover.
Drone view of Cafeología's roof just before the drying beds were brought up.
“Here, we have total control over the process,” he says, because he can check the progress of drying and fermentation multiple times a day. While these are laboratory conditions, they can derive general recommendations from them, which Diana and her agronomy team can then pass on to producers.
Focus on Quality
In 2022, Cafeología processed approximately 70 tons of green coffee. This is about as much as we roasted in 2022. Of these 70 tons, they roast almost half themselves, and the rest goes to the local specialty market or for export.
Cafeología's focus is on distinctive, high-quality coffees scoring over 85 points according to SCA standards. Not all coffees from producers they work directly with reach 85 points. For these coffees, which score between 84 and 85 points, they have created two dedicated cafés, "Carajillo." These offer specialty coffee that is a bit more accessible, thereby also creating a larger market for their partner producers. Coffees below 84 points are sold on the local green coffee market.
All producers receive this receipt, which certifies the quality of their cherries and defines the expected payment.
The strong focus on complex coffees is, of course, interesting from a sensory perspective. However, it is important to consider whether this very focus excludes producers, and if so, how.
Visit to Aldama at the Beneficio Comunitario
We visit the Beneficio Comunitario. This is a collection point for coffee cherries. Cafeología built this station together with a local coffee producer. For this, we drive to Aldama, an indigenous Tzotzíl community, not far from San Cristóbal. Two hours by car or 30 air kilometers physically separate the two places - but in terms of content, there's a universe between them.
“I grew up in Chiapas,” Pablo says, “and I never had to define myself by my skin color. I'm from here, after all. But the first time I was in Aldama, I was suddenly the white guy.”
Aldama is located east of San Cristóbal in a region that showed much sympathy for the socially revolutionary Zapatista movement in the 1990s. The history of the region is different from that of San Cristóbal. The rural areas are still characterized by strong indigenous customs, traditions, and values. In the small communities, few people speak Spanish, and the communities often stay and live among themselves. This fragmentation creates micro-regions and micro-worlds, so much so that Cafeología initially worked with three translators in the San Cristóbal area alone.
In Aldama itself, we meet Inéz Vázquez. She is the daughter of Pedro Vázquez, from whom we have already roasted two nano-lots. Inéz is a young woman who worked as a barista at Cafeología for five years, then roasted coffee, and today she manages a collection point for coffee cherries. This fact alone breaks with many traditions in her community: as a young woman, she takes on a job previously only performed by men. She manages the beneficio and thus not only has responsibility but is also endowed with many rights - she decides which quality of cherries are bought or rejected. At the same time, she provides feedback and conducts workshops for producers to convey Cafeología's philosophy.
Inéz Vázquez. Producer's daughter, entrepreneur, barista, roaster.
“The beginning was a bit bumpy,” says Inéz. But after three years, the number of producers delivering cherries to Inéz has tripled. The quality is constantly improving, and that is primarily due to the simple, direct, and transparent way Cafeología and Inéz share knowledge.
There are no surprises for producers because, firstly, Cafeología communicates the prices for delivered coffee cherries before the season and makes them public for everyone. What might sound obvious is precisely not the standard in coffee-producing countries. Often, coffee is harvested without knowing what the equivalent value will be at the end of the day. This seemingly small lever revolutionizes an entire system.
Above all, however, it creates incentives in a region that is largely ignored by official Mexico. The recent history of the Zapatista region seems to be one reason why there are few state interventions or development programs to support the impoverished rural population. Far too often, and in this case too, there are state pensions intended to support people, but in reality, they keep them quiet and in a vicious circle.
In the region around Aldama, young people are entitled to their own house at the age of 15. There are no building zones. So, whoever wants to build can do so without major restrictions, no matter where. In addition, there is a government subsidy. Parents also receive a state pension for each child. And this combination results in a cocktail where there are many young people in the region who have many children and live in their own one-room house. The money from child pensions often suffices for survival, but not for much more.
Coffee Quality as an Incentive
"That's not a system, that's stagnation," says Inéz. No incentives are created to do anything. In Cafeología's system, however, it's all about incentives. Aldama is located in a region from 1800 to 2000m above sea level. The region has little coffee rust because it is very cool. Many producers work organically because they don't even have access to mineral fertilizer. Varieties like Gesha, Bourbon, or Java grow here, which are no longer cultivated in many parts of Mexico because they are not rust-resistant. The prerequisites for high quality are there. But to truly achieve it, plant care and precise harvesting are necessary.
Claudia and Diana
Diana is an agronomist and looks after all the producers Cafeología works with. I love and appreciate traveling with agronomists, asking detailed questions and getting profound answers. Diana advises producers on how to develop their farms sustainably in the long term, what suitable varieties are for new plantings, how diseases and plagues can be prevented proactively, and how other crops can be planted between the coffee trees.
What about organic production? "Step by step," says Diana. Mexico and organic coffee is a story in itself. Since the 1980s, Mexico has been one of the largest producers of organic coffee, which is mainly supplied to the USA. All coffee regions in Mexico have focused on organic coffee, but primarily on certification, not on plant care.
"Many organic farms here are ruined," I heard again and again. Organic doesn't just happen. Organic is not simply organic because nothing more is done. And this approach prevailed in Chiapas for a long time. "Whoever doesn't fertilize, whoever doesn't cut, whoever simply does nothing, that's organic," says Diana. But organic isn't about "doing nothing" - it's about working with the soil, the entire farm system, and that requires a deep understanding and a lot of work if it's to succeed.
"First we have to show that we are trustworthy partners. Then we have to show that we need high quality. And then we slowly introduce our producers to near-natural production."
Many organic farms in the region believe that organic = doing nothing.
It must be noted here that the vast majority of producers working with Cafeología already operate in an extremely nature-friendly manner, some even organically. However, there are also many bad and recent memories of organic certification.
Certification for individual producers is unrealistic, especially if they are small. One way to certification is through cooperatives, which in Mexico are often double-certified, organic and Fairtrade. However, a cooperative alone does not make a difference; it must be diligently managed and developed, in the service of its members. Too often, cooperatives have broken down due to misappropriation of funds, or members' opinions not being heard, leading to a loss of trust and the dissolution of many cooperatives.
“Paso por paso. Rushing achieves nothing. We need to build understanding, gain trust, and then move forward step by step. We are still guests here, after all.” Diana, who comes from Colombia, feels this threefold: as a woman, as a white person, as a Colombian.
The Dry Mill and Export
Once the coffee is dried, it is processed for export at their own dry mill. It was the first time I hadn't worn a face mask in a dry mill. There was barely any dust. "We clean the hulling machines after each run," says Pablo. After that, the green coffee is sorted by density and size. They repeat this process five times as standard - I've never seen that before.
The high uniformity achieved results in an extremely homogeneous roasting quality, as all beans can process the energy from the roaster evenly. This year, we bought two nanolots from Cafeología. The coffees are brought to Europe via Belco.
We are delighted about this partnership with Cafeología. It's a pleasure to exchange such broad and deep insights about coffee. We are able to offer you annual nano-lots from the San Cristóbal region, allowing us to collaboratively deepen our sensory understanding of the region.
