Union San Pedro is an association of eight communities around the town of San Pedro El Alto in Oaxaca's Sierra Sur, representing around 180 coffee producing families in total. Coffee growing here is in real difficulty: leaf rust and poverty have cut production in some areas by as much as 90%, and much of the work of the association is focused on helping smallholder farmers rebuild yields.

Union San Pedro is coordinated by Salomon Garcia, a calm, driven force behind the association since he helped found it in the early 2000s. Salomon is originally from Xanica, one of the association's eight communities. He now works full time with the region's producers, providing agricultural support to help them experiment with higher yielding, more disease resistant varieties. As the association grew, he also went on to co-found UNTAO (Unión Nacional de Trabajadores Agrícolas Oaxaqueños), the co-operative owned exporter and dry mill still used to mill these coffees in Oaxaca city today.

Almost all of the coffee grown by these farmers has to be blended into community lots, which makes co-operatives like Union San Pedro vital to the survival of coffee growing here. In February 2026, Corinne, The Milk Shed's Head of Coffee, travelled to Oaxaca with Raw Material and Red Beetle Coffee Lab, and spent time in Tierra Blanca, one of the association's eight communities. Forty-two producers farm here, each tending between one and four hectares on steep, mineral-rich hillsides, and the community produces the highest average yield of all eight in the association, even as individual farmer yields swing wildly, from as little as 25kg up to 900kg of parchment.

This particular lot is a smaller selection within that: coffee from seven producers, drawn from three of Union San Pedro's sub-associations, Los Naranjos, Tierra Blanca and Malvavisco. It's a mix of two varieties typical to the Sierra Sur. Mundo Novo makes up part of the blend, alongside Pluma Hidalgo, the region's own local mutation of Typica, named for the nearby mountain town where feather-shaped clouds gather over the peaks, and for Miguel Hidalgo, father of Mexican independence. Cherries are hand pulped and fermented in traditional wooden tanks.

This coffee also reflects a wider shift happening across the Sierra Sur: a move away from anonymous group lots toward greater producer-level traceability. Working with Red Beetle, Salomon has helped build a feedback loop that gives producers real, physical and sensory analysis of every sample they deliver, cupped daily in Red Beetle's HQ lab, showing them exactly where their coffee sits on the pricing scale and what to improve. The result is more granularity, better prices for better quality, and a genuine incentive for producers to keep raising the bar.