About This Coffee
Owner Mozart Tiso has dedicated his life to coffee production. He left his previous career as a dentist to pursue coffee cultivation. Tiso, aided by his two sons, who are both agronomists, work to improve their farm and conserve the environment.
The farm is rich in flora and fauna. The total farm is 450 hectares. Coffee is cultivated on 200 hectares and much of the rest of the land is a wildlife conservation zone.
Harvest & Post-Harvest
Tiso and his sons have adopted a new drying method that allows for effective and consistent drying despite adverse weather conditions. The method also incorporates a slight fermentation which produces the distinctively fruity flavors in this coffee.
After harvest, cherry is dried in static box dryers to ensure even drying. Static dryers are metal boxes that can be opened to allow a cooling breeze to pass through and closed to prevent rain.
NY 2/3
This coffee is NY 2/3, which assures us that there are no more than 8-12 visible defects in a 300-gram sample. This small number of defects would be 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.