About This Coffee
Owner Marcos Antonio de Freitas watched his family farm grow up alongside him. His family purchased their first hectare in Santa Vargem in 1963 and began planting coffee. Marcos and his family are involved in every aspect of farm management and cultivation. Marcos graduated from college with a degree in agronomics in 1984 and moved to Perdões, intending to grow the family business.
And their passion paid off. Today, Marcos cultivates 225 hectares of coffee and owns 320 hectares in total.
Cultivation
Marcos is dedicated to sustainable growth. He uses organic fertilizer that’s a blend of sugar cane bagasse and animal manure, and powers much of the farm with solar panels. Marcos is always seeking new techniques to improve cup quality.
Harvest & Post-Harvest
Marcos focuses on specialty coffee processing at Fazenda São Jose. Cherry is harvested and washed in clean water. Cherry is dried in mechanical dryers that slowly dry cherry to the perfect moisture content.
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.