About This Coffee
Our classic Diamond quality, with beans size 17/18, and its smaller brother Crystal (screen 15/16) now have a chunky big brother: Pink Star. It is selected following the same principles as the Crystal and Diamond qualities. Pink Star is also a mixture of Santos and Cerrado coffees. This combination is an approved recipe for big and smooth coffees which won’t overpower or dramatically influence the flavor profile of your blend.
The full grade of our Pink Star is NY2 ss fc scr19. NY2 refers to the defect equivalent allowed in the green beans (4 full defects, no blacks), screen 19 refers to the screen size, promising you clean-looking large beans. FC stands for fine cup and together with SS, meaning strictly soft, these two quality labels indicate the coffee should be stable and clean-cupping. The idea behind these qualities is to provide you with a solid and trustworthy base for their blends. This coffee is mostly sweet and round-bodied, with low acidity and chocolate/nutty flavor notes.
About Cooxupé
With over 60 years of experience in the national and international sector, Cooxupé is a standard in the Brazilian coffee industry. Cooxupé was founded in 1932 as a cooperative providing agricultural credit. In 1957, their evolution into the Regional Coffee Growers’ Cooperative of Guaxupé led them to begin working with producers to sell coffee to the international market
Today, Cooxupé represents approximately 12,000 members, selling to over 40 countries. Their producers work in Sul de Minas and Cerrado, in the Minas Gerais region, as well as in the Rio Pardo Valley in São Paulo. Ninety-seven percent of their members are small-scale farming families. For these members, their small plots generate most of their annual income, making remunerative prices even more vital to their continued livelihoods.
Cooxupé takes their social responsibility towards their members seriously. In the rural areas where the cooperative works they have developed health and scholarship programs and provided education and agricultural training. In these trainings, they put focus on the younger generations of coffee farmers and on building sustainable farming systems.
An extremely successful program of theirs, called Escola Consciente, won the Andef Award in 2014. The Andef Award is considered one of the most important awards in Brazilian agriculture.
Cooxupé continues to utilize their size to make a difference. In 2013 they launched the Environmental Education Center to help reduce the impact of farming by encouraging future generations of farmers to be even more eco-conscious.
Coffee in Brazil
Just under 40% of all coffee in the world is produced in Brazil - around 3.7 million metric tons annually. With so much coffee produced, it’s no wonder that the country produces a wide range of qualities. Brazil produces everything from natural Robusta, to the neutral and mild Santos screen 17/18, to the distinctive Rio Minas 17/18. In recent years, Brazilian producers have also begun investing more heavily in specialty coffee production. Through our in-country partners in Brazil, including our sister company, we are able to provide a wide range of Brazilian coffees to our clients: from macrolot to microlot.
Today, the most prolific coffee growing regions of Brazil are Espirito Santo, São Paulo, Minas Gerais, and Bahia. Most Brazilian coffee is grown on large farms that are built and equipped for maximizing production output through mechanical harvesting and processing. The relatively flat landscape across many of Brazil’s coffee regions combined with high minimum wages has led most farms to opt for this type of mechanical harvesting over selective hand-picking.
In the past, mechanization meant that strip-picking was the norm; however, today’s mechanical harvesters are increasingly sensitive, meaning that farms can harvest only fully ripe cherries at each pass, which is good news for specialty-oriented producers.
In many cases and on less level sections of farms, a mixed form of ‘manual mechanized’ harvesting may be used, where ripe coffee is picked using a derriçadeira – a sort of mechanized rake that uses vibration to harvest ripe cherry. A tarp is spanned between coffee trees to capture the cherry as it falls.
With the aid of these newer, more selective technologies, there’s a growing number of farms who are increasingly concerned with – and able to deliver - cup quality.