Origin story
Brazil
A third of the world's coffee, grown on ground flat enough to drive across.
The scale nobody else has
Brazil has been the largest coffee producer on earth for more than a century and a half, and grows something close to a third of the global crop. When the price of coffee moves anywhere in the world, it usually moved in Brazil first — a frost in Minas Gerais is a line on a chart in every importer's office.
That scale is possible because the coffee land here is not mountainside. Much of it is high plateau, gently rolling, plantable in long straight rows, and harvestable by machine. Farms are measured in hundreds of hectares where an Ethiopian holding is measured in fractions of one.
Dry climate, dry process
Brazil's harvest falls in a reliably dry winter, which is why the country processes naturally when most of the Americas washes. The whole cherry goes onto a patio or a raised bed and dries in the sun, often finished in mechanical dryers, and the sugars in the fruit work their way into the seed.
The pulped natural — skin off, mucilage left on — was developed here and is now used worldwide under the Central American name honey process. It was a Brazilian answer to a Brazilian problem: how to get some of the cleanliness of a washed coffee without the water, and some of the sweetness of a natural without the risk.
What mechanisation costs and buys
A harvester straddles the row and shakes ripe and unripe fruit off together. Sorting then happens after the fact, by density, size and colour, in mills that are closer to industrial plants than to farm buildings. It is efficient, and it is why a great deal of Brazilian coffee is competent rather than remarkable.
The specialty end of the country responds by doing the opposite deliberately — hand-picking selected blocks, separating lots by altitude and varietal, and entering them in the national cup-of-excellence competitions that have reset expectations of what Brazil can produce.
The cup everyone already knows
Cocoa, roasted hazelnut, a heavy soft body and very little acidity. It is the taste most people mean when they say coffee, because it is the base of most espresso blends sold in Europe, and it is superb with milk.
Drunk as a filter it asks for a lighter roast than it usually gets: pushed too dark, that low acidity leaves nothing to hold the sweetness up.
Underrated by people who have only met it inside a blend, and the most reliable espresso base there is.
In the shop
