About This Coffee
Before owning Fazenda Bom Sucesso, Jose Vitor Luz worked for many years as a farm manager. In 1999, after consulting with his wife, Luiza, the couple decided to purchase their own farm. Always maintaining a positive outlook, the two work on the farm year-round, striving to continuously improve the quality of their coffee.
In addition to their daily work on the farm, Jose and Luiza love to host their friends at their home. They often have friends over to have a cachaça (a popular Brazilian spirit made from fermented sugarcane juice) and eat a roasted chicken that had been raised on their own land. Their table is also filled with a wide variety of tropical fruits from the orchard they cultivate on their land in addition to coffee trees.
Harvest & Post-Harvest
Cherry is handpicked and dried on a patio for approximately 28 days. After the cherry is finished drying, it is bagged and transferred to the COCATREL warehouse where it rests for 3 months bags with a high plastic barrier that is equivalent to storing in GrainPro before continuing on to dry milling and export.
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.