Espresso: Brazil Sul de Minas Fazenda Salto Natural

Falcon provides us with our first Brazil of the season. Seasonality is very important for us and we try to buy coffees in season as much as possible. The last harvest in Brazil was not good, resulting in low quality coffees and raising overall coffee prices. This one is perfect for our house espresso, with notes of lemon and orange, nutty caramel brittle and chocolate.

This coffee is produced by the Araujo Reis family at Fazenda Salto. Their strong belief in social equity and environmental protection extends to every aspect of their farm from an excellent school to safe housing for workers and stringent wastewater treatment protocols.  One important pillar of Fazenda Salto is their focus on education for the children of farm workers and those in the surrounding community. The Araujo Reis family puts an emphasis on education, and many of them have doctorates and other high-level degrees. They founded a school on the farm about 50 years ago for the children of workers. Today, that school has blossomed into a model school that’s run by the state and educates the children of workers and children from the surrounding community. In particular, the school has an internet access project that connects children to the wider world through the internet and teaches them valuable computer skills.

Fazenda Salto employs approximately 35 full time employees, and they hire additional labor during the harvest season. The land is hilly and they placed their trees strategically so that it was planted on land that the mechanical harvesters could reach. Harvesting is done mechanically with specialized machines that selectively remove ripe, red cherry from trees. The mechanical harvester can be set to specific standards to select cherry from only certain parts of the tree (such as lower, middle or top). Once harvested, ripe cherry is floated to separate out unripe cherry.

Ripe, red cherry is laid on patios to dry. The Araujo Reis family chose Natural processing because it uses significantly less water than other processing methods. If the weather is uncooperative, they also have 8 rotating driers and 8 static driers to finish the drying process. 80% of energy for their processing and drying machinery comes from solar panels that they installed in 2019.