Avenue Coffee - Fazenda Santa Barbara (Brazil)

Notes of peanut brittle and toffee popcorn in a deliciously easy drinking Brazil.

A big topic in the production of Brazilian coffees is their use of machines to harvest and dry the coffee. Every other speciality growing region will use hand picking and the common belief is that it improves quality. However, this is not necessarily true & there is a simple reason for Brazils use of more machinery. The price to hire enough pickers for hand picking in Brazil dwarfs that of other countries and is just not plausible for the farmers here. They have to innovate. This coffee has been hand sorted after harvesting to ensure we get the ripest cherries possible set aside for speciality lots like this one, it achieves what hand picking does but allows for a sustainable labour cost.

The coffee is then pre-dried on a patio for 4 days before going through a mechanical drying process which involves a 12 hour drying cycle & 12 hours of rest per day. Again this comes down to cost of labour in Brazil and debates aside the coffees coming from this area are scoring extremely well & we have to say the end result is a cup filled with sweet brown sugar & peanut flavours as well as bright citric acidity and dark chocolate.