Take a tour of Brazilian coffee farms with our Head Roaster Stephen

The Brazilian Coffee Industry

Brazil is a country so entwined with coffee that the two are almost synonymous.

There's a reason that Brazil accounts for 40% of all global coffee production. With flavour notes of chocolate, nuts and berries, Brazilian coffee is a real crowd pleaser. For the last decade, Brazil has produced between 40 and 65 million 60kg bags per year. At Redemption, Brazilian coffee also accounts for 40% of our coffee and provides a versatile base component for our house espresso.

Recently, I had the incredible opportunity to visit Brazil with one of our coffee suppliers, Kamba Coffee.

Introducing Patricia

During the visit, I met with coffee producer Patricia Coelho in person for the first time. Patricia's rich and chocolatey coffee is a key component in our house espresso, The Block. Patricia runs her family farm, and proudly claims the titles of Producer, Mother, Wife, Merchant and Businesswoman. In an industry where women provide 70% of production labour, but own fewer than 30% of coffee farms worldwide, Patricia is an anomaly.

I found out about Patricia and her work with Kamba last year, when planning the launch of our second House Espresso blend. When I heard more about Patricia’s story, I knew she was the right fit. Originally producing only commercial grade coffee, our supplier has been working with her for three years, helping her grow in the speciality industry. Year on year, the quality of the coffees Patricia is producing are improving as she invests more time and resources in her farming practices. Over time, the goal is to transition even more of her total production into the speciality market, where she can achieve better prices based on the quality of her crop.

Santo Antonio Coffee Farm

During the visit, we travelled to Santo Antonio, Patricia Coelho’s higher altitude coffee farm. Santo During During the visit, we travelled to Santo Antonio, Patricia Coelho’s higher altitude coffee farm. Santo Antonio is the highest farm in the region at 1150-1250 masl. Here, Patricia plants several coffee varieties: Mundo Novo, Acaia (which goes into our house coffee), Yellow Catuai, Yellow Icatu and Tupi. Named for a chapel on the property dedicated to the patron saint of marriage, Santo Antonio extends over 24 hectares and has been in Patricia’s family for over a hundred years.

Sustainability at Santo Antonio

The coffee market price has skyrocketed over the last 12 months. Factors such as last year’s frosts and the conflict in Ukraine have driven the cost of fertiliser, already one of the most expensive of farming inputs, up by 40%. To ameliorate this, Patricia utilises the dried husk of the coffee fruit - a naturally occurring byproduct of coffee production - as a natural, cost effective and sustainable fertiliser. This is not the only sustainability initiative Patricia runs at her farm. Very recently, she has installed a number of beehives at Santo Antonio, which will assist with the natural pollination of the coffee plants.

The talent of a coffee producer lies in maintaining the delicate balance between pushing the yearly yield of the plants whilst maintaining the quality of what’s produced. Well-tended plants can have a productive lifespan of around 20 years, but this requires diligent pruning every few years - not light trimming in the way you might tidy your garden, but fully stripping a tree back in order to allow it to replenish. Patricia prunes 35% of her trees each year, and uses these prunings to fire the mechanical dryers used in the post-harvest processing of the coffee - another practice which supports a cyclical, sustainable approach to her farming.

Harvesting

The harvest season in the Pinhal region runs from May through to September, so I was able to see the very early stages of picking during my visit. Unlike in Central America, Brazilian producers will generally do only one harvest during the season. The cost of labour is higher than elsewhere, and the farms are much larger, so it is very expensive to do multiple pickings. Mechanised farming is much more common in Brazil; the downside to this is that the precision of skilled handpicking is lost.

Producers in Brazil hope for consistent rainfall from September through to March, then dry weather for the duration of the harvest. Typically, Brazilian producers will wait until only 10-20% of the crop is still green (unripe) before starting the harvest, although many will harvest and sell some of their lower quality lots early in order to fund the remainder of the harvest.

Post Harvest Processing

On our second day in Brazil, we visited Fazenda Santana, a showcase farm run by Pinhalense who are a big name in manufacturing coffee processing equipment. Here we were shown the various stages of coffee processing - broadly, how we get from the harvested fruit to the seeds inside, which are the exportable coffee beans ready for roasting. Post-harvest processing takes many forms, but traditionally these will sit on a spectrum somewhere between 'natural' and 'washed'. The natural post-harvesting process is most common in Brazil due to typically wider space on farms and less rainfall during the harvest season.

The first stage in any form of processing is to sort the coffee cherries by ripeness, removing any under- or overripe fruit. In natural processing, harvested cherries are cleaned, then laid out in a thin layer on patios or raised beds to dry. During this stage, they are continually raked to stop them from over-fermenting. After a period of drying on patios, the cherries are transferred to large mechanical driers for further drying - this allows a more stable, consistent fermentation process, and protects the cherries from the elements. The timescale for each of the drying periods varies and is determined by the producer, the weather, the equipment available and a number of other factors. At the Pinhalense farm, the full drying process takes about 2-3 days; at Patricia’s farm it’s closer to 3 weeks, as she doesn’t have the modern equipment that Pinhalense does.

Milling & export

After drying, the coffee is hulled to remove the remaining dried fruit husk, mucilage and parchment layers. The coffee cherries are then delivered and sold to a mill, like those operated by Costa Cafe. We visited both the commercial and speciality mills operated by Costa Cafe, where the last stages in the preparation of coffee for export occur. At the mill, each lot of coffee is run through densimetric and laser machinery to remove defects and foreign objects by weight and colour, respectively, as well as sorting the beans by size. The discarded beans are collated into lots sold on the internal market; the remaining coffee is graded, stored, then bagged up for transport, either in larger bags for commodity coffee or smaller hessian sacks for speciality. These are then, finally, loaded into shipping containers for the long sea voyage to us here in the UK (and everywhere else coffee is consumed!)

Final Thoughts

It was such a valuable experience to visit the various farms and mills to understand the incredible amount of work and dedication that goes into coffee before it arrives to us in the roastery. It was especially an honour to meet Patricia and it reaffirmed the decision to begin working with her for such a core product on our menu. Stylish and enthusiastic, Patricia was also incredibly modest about her operation - we bumped into her again in a second-hand furniture store in Pinhal, after having visited a number of other farms, and she commented that her farm must have seemed the worst. But when showing us around Santo Antonio, she clearly took a quiet pride in her work. And the proof is in the pudding – the launch of The Block has been a great success, with excellent feedback from our baristas and customers alike. Meeting Patricia and gaining a better, first-hand understanding of the sweat and blood that goes into coffee farming and processing was incredibly invigorating. It’s exactly this that makes my job so exciting! I’m really looking forward to developing our relationship with Patricia in the years to come.