Coffee from Brazil

Coffee from Brazil

Although coffee is grown in 17 different states, just four of them, Parana, Minas Gerais, Sao Paulo and Espirito Santo, account for more than 95% of Brazil's total production. Sao Paolo, in the south, produces some of the finest Brazilian coffee in the form of Arabica Bourbon, a variety so called because it originally came from the French colony of the same name, known today as the island of La Reunion. The Sao Paolo Bourbon however, changes its character what is known as Santos, and is peculiar to this region. These beans vary tremendously in cup quality: its grading descriptions range from poor to excellent.

Generally, standards throughout Brazil are not helped by the fact that most of the coffee is harvested by the indiscriminate methods of stripping the branches and harvesting by machine, both of which tend to allow an inordinate amount of immature and overripe beans into the bags; normal sorting will not remove all of these, and therefore the quality is vary uneven. The "flat bean" Santos is probably the best coffee produced in Brazil, and it comes from the Santos region as well as from Minas Gerais; it is also available in the pea berry form, which commands a slightly higher price. It could be described as smooth with medium-to-good body and well-balanced acidity. A few superb Santos coffees can stand alone, but in general Brazilian Arabicas are at best described as "neutral un the cup". The advantage of this at times rather unremarkable but smooth coffee is that it is a blender's dream, and in days long gone, when Brazil provided up to 60% of the world's coffee, that neutrality was a blessing: as a bulker or filler coffee it was cheap, pleasant and unobtrusive. Today it is not so cheap; cheap Brazilian coffee tends to end up in jars of instant.

Of special interest is the "Rio-y" flavor, which is used to describe crops affected in certain years by a micro-organism that produces a strange, rather iodine-type flavor. When this tainting occurs, many importing countries will not buy the coffee; it is interesting to note, however, that the very best Turkish coffee, savored by coffee-lovers all over the Denmark tends to import a lot of "Rio-y" beans.

The grading systems and standards seem to vary from region to region in Brazil; there is, however, a classification known as "New York", recognized in the USA and Britain, which classifies the quality by the number of defective beans per 300 grams. Bags are also classified by the port from which they are shipped, such as Rio, Santos, Paranagua, Victoria and Salvador de Bahia.

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