Brazil, Terra Alta Lot #5004 Coffee Beans

Brazil Terra Alta is one of the top farms in the entire country of Brazil.  From start to finish Paulo and his dedicated team work literally day and night during harvest to perfect their coffees through a string of quality steps that begin with variety separation and experimentation.

It has been a couple of years since visiting Paulo’s farm, but we do remember witnessing Paulo getting up in the late night hours to go check on the fermentation to see if the coffee was ready.  Paulo checks the coffee using a few techniques.  One of the most unusual things that he does is constantly dunk his hand in the pulp covered coffee to check for its fermentation and drying point.  By tasting the honey-like pulp surrounding the coffee he is able to note if it is time to pull the coffee or just continue to rake it.  This has only been developed with years of doing it. 

Another technique that helps promote sweetness in the cup is the particular style in which the coffee is spread onto the raised beds. The coffee is left in larger mounds initially which allows a little more fermentation inside the warm center of these mounts.  This in addition to the fact that they are one of the only farms in the entire country using 100% raised African style beds, makes this a very unique coffee and hands down the best we have had from the country.

This year, Paulo used these same techniques with one twist. He contained the coffee in temperature controlled tanks and kept the temperature around 18-21°C. He told us by doing this he got the noticeable fermentation character sooner. This contributes to the crazy amount of sweetness and fruity flavors of this coffee. We rarely ever have a coffee from Brazil on our single origin offering list. If you are an OG, you know we love to roast Paulo’s coffee as our 431 profile, but we could not pass up the opportunity to highlight this coffee on our pour over/filter coffee menu.