About This Coffee
José Taramelli, the Taramelli family patriarch, purchased the first 12 hectares of the family’s now 450 hectares farm in 1949. Taramelli, an Italian immigrant, dedicated all his efforts to coffee production. Soon, he was increasing the farm’s size by purchasing more and more land from other farmers in the area. In 1980, Taramelli was one of the first farms in Mogiana region to install coffee processing infrastructure.
Taramelli passed away in 1992, and the mantel of the family coffee farm was taken up by his son, Antônio Gabriel Taramelli. Antônio Gabriel has continued to improve productivity, quality and processing by embracing new technology and ideas.
Today the farm covers a sprawling 450 hectares in the Valle da Grama. 90 hectares of the total hectarage are kept under environmental preservation to protect water sources and enable local wildlife to thrive.
Harvest & Post-Harvest
Sao Caetano has 28 full time employees living on the farm. The number of employees swells in the harvest season to ensure all ripe cherry is harvested in a timely manner. After harvest, cherry is laid on patios to dry. Depending on weather conditions, cherry may be slowly dried in electric dryers at low temperatures.
NY2
NY2 is a designation that assures us that there are no more than 6 visible defects in a 300-gram sample. This small number of defects is unnoticeable in most cups, ensuring a consistent and delicious flavor.
Screen 16
This coffee is screen 16. Screens are used to separate beans by size. The process of separating beans by size is a crucial stage of the dry milling process. A screen grading machine has a series of screens stacked on top of each other. Green coffee is fed into the machine, and as the screens are shaken, beans that are smaller than holes on a specific screen will fall through to a lower screen until they reach a screen with holes too small for them to fit.
16 screens have holes that keep beans that are larger than 6.5 millimeters. Thus, beans in a 16+ lot are above 6.5 millimeters.
Uniformity in bean sizes helps keep roasting more constant since similar size beans will roast along similar trajectories.
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.