Summer was very busy for us at Chronicle for many reasons, one of them being move of our roastery, but also because of harvest period in South American countries, where our directly sourced coffee mainly come from. Our team visited Peru in July and Brazil in August, and Brazil is the topic of today’s article.
Brazil is a very specific country in specialty coffee world. Until couple years back, it had a label of massive production in coffee focusing on quantity instead of quality, and still till this day, lots of people close their eye to Brazilian coffees. The reasons for that perception are still heavy there – biggest producing country in the world, majority of coffee is harvested mechanically, and lots of Brazilian coffees have the distinguishing taste profile which especially light roast drinkers are not much appealed by.
I had the pleasure to visit both big cooperatives who showed us specialty coffee but in a massive scale, but also small producers with 3-hectare farms. To understand Brazilian coffee, you need to understand the role of cooperatives for the small farmers. Coffee importers in North America and Europe buy coffee on financial terms, but farmers want to get money from their crop immediately and don’t want to wait 30 or 60 days. That’s why cooperatives are so powerful in Brazil and during price negotiations with importers.
We source our coffee from a smaller cooperative called Mantissa, which works with small farms, produce specialty coffees, and their tasting profile matches what we require from Brazilian coffees. We’ve visited their facility, they showed us their production and experimental fermentation methods and we cupped together current harvest, which was affected by a long draught during spring in Brazil, resulting in smaller bean size and lower yield (in some parts of Brazil reaching up to 15% lower yield y/y).
We have also tried some anaerobic coffees and fruity blends of Mundo Novo and Bourbon, which we’ll try to bring to our coffee community in Canada very soon.
