This coffee comes to us through our partnership with Cafeología. Based in Chiapas, Mexico, Cafeología is dedicated to strengthening coffee communities by combining scientific research, education, and direct collaboration with producers. Their work supports small farmers , helping preserve traditional practices while fostering innovation and creating opportunities for future generations.
If you’d like to learn more about them, check out our interview with Jesús Salazar, founder of Cafeología: Video 1 and Video 2
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Beneficios Comunitarios embody Cafeología’s philosophy: open spaces where coffee sparks deep relationships among growers, families, and the Cafeología team. Each mill is a living classroom where empirical wisdom meets rigorous quality practice. Founded in 2020 in the Tseltal village of Sibactel, Tenejapa, Beneficio Comunitario Sibactel operates on a smaller scale than its sister mill in Aldama. Here, about 90 Tseltal producers bring freshly picked cherries not for full processing, but for guidance and support, since, by cultural tradition, most farmers wash, ferment, and dry their coffee at home using stone pilas and patio roofs.
Cafeología’s agronomy team walks the hills house to house, offering coaching on selective picking, flotation, and fermentation, later verifying moisture, water activity, and cup quality when parchment arrives at the mill for consolidation and export preparation. During harvest, Sibactel becomes a shared quality checkpoint, generating local jobs in parchment intake, defect sorting, and data logging. The mill’s courtyard also serves as a forum for neighbors to exchange knowledge on ripeness standards, drying tips, and seedling care for the next season. Today, these ninety hillside families transform dispersed backyard batches into a single, consistent, and traceable stream of coffee, showing that a community mill can be both a center of quality and a space of learning.