About This Coffee
Monte Alegre is a fourth-generation family farm in the Sul de Minas region of Minas Gerais. The estate has been run by the Vieira family for 101 years and boy, do they know how to do coffee! The huge estate sets a model for the technologically advanced, sustainable production of quality coffees.
Monte Alegre Coffee is dedicated to preserving the environment and engages in recycling water, conscious use of energy, reforestation and management of fertilizer and of solid and liquid waste. Data collectors register the entire production process from the field to the mill and drying patio. The detailed data are registered to provide full traceability behind each quality. This allows the team at Monte Alegre to understand why a certain coffee show certain characteristics, or what to attribute these to. They record anything relating to agricultural practices, harvest times, processing, drying method and period, storage and cup results.
Cultivation
An effective management system promotes a process of continuous improvement, towards sustainable agriculture, and meets the requirements for international certifications. In this way, the estate produces a safe and traceable product to the consumers. Monte Alegre invests in a modern agronomic monitoring system to protect the environment. Measures such as recycling water, septic tanks, reforestation, conscious use of energy, integrated management of solid and liquid waste, wastewater usage for irrigation, fertilizer management and vehicle fleet review, among others, are taken. Over 20% from the farm area consists of Legal Reserve and Permanent Preservation Areas (APPs) that contribute to the biodiversity conservation, ecosystems and water resources. On social aspects, Monte Alegre has the goal to protect the human well-being and workers’ rights, looking for the improvement of life standard.
Harvest & Post-Harvest
This coffee was processed using the Natural method and slowly dried under sun on the farm's expansive patios.
Since Monte Alegre is such a huge coffee estate on relatively flat terrain, machines can harvest the rows of coffee trees. Similar to what you see in vineyards, these machines strip the ripe cherries from the branches. They can be finetuned to apply more or less pressure. With less pressure, most of the unripe cherries will still resist and cling to the branches, while the ripe cherries come off easily. Prior to processing, cherries are cleaned by a ventilating and shaking machine to remove branches and leaves. A flotation step separates the ripe cherries from, green and semi-dry cherries by density. Another machine can separate the cherries by size and colour.
In the wet process, the cherries can be pulped. The unripe ones with harder pulp are not pulped and the ripe ones with soft pulp are pulped by a pressure system. The pulped ripe cherries result in pulped natural coffee. The mucilage can be removed by biological fermentation in water tanks resulting in fully washed coffee, or in a demucilator machine resulting in semi-washed coffee.
Monte Alegre Coffees adopts techniques for reusing water to reduce its wastewater production and water consumption.
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.