Star Maya H16 - Alejandro Martinez, Mexico

This coffee brings the unique and remarkable flavor of Veracruz to your cup. This is NOT a Central American coffee. This is a North American coffee and the results in the cup bear that out. Veracruz is our favorite coffee region in Mexico, and soon it will be yours as well. This is the quintessential flavors of Northern Veracruz abounding in black and green grape, soft milk chocolate and sweet almonds. No citrus, no bakers chocolate. Stupid sweet.

A first-generation (F1) hybrid originating from a cross between Marsellesa and a male-sterile Ethiopian or Sudanese landrace variety. F1 hybrid varieties are still relatively new in coffee agriculture; only a handful have become commercially available to farmers in the last 15 years, and only in select countries. So far, Starmaya is the only F1 hybrid in the world that professional seed producers can propagate by seed, rather than through costly biotechnology. Before Starmaya, the only way to efficiently reproduce F1 hybrids for farmers has been through cloning (tissue culture cloning/somatic embryogenesis) or manual pollination of the mother and father plants, both of which methods are costly and have limited capacity.

The Martinez family has always lived in the Xalapa-Coatepec area in the state of Veracruz. The farm was established by his great- great-grandfather Antonio Martinez. The dream of Alejandro is to revive the coffee culture in Coatepec. He started to plant rust-resistant varieties always separated by plot so that he can compare the results of each plot both in productivity and quality. His coffee has been resulting very well lately, Marsellesa and Mundo Maya represent high quality with consistency for some years, and his first harvests of Anacafe and Obata represented good as well with more unique characters.