With each iteration of Article, we aim to compose a coffee that has great balance, packed with classic coffee characteristics whilst retaining a sweet, clean finish.
Article 1 – Saravá, Chapada Diamantina, Bahia, Brazil
This season we cupped lots of samples from Brazil to ensure we found the right coffee to use across our house blends. Our preference has always been for coffees that are clean and sweet that taste fresh and vibrant. The same goes when we source our Brazil coffees, where we seek out lots that have a creamy body, fresh but mellow acidity and bags of brown sugar and milk chocolate sweetness. This season we have sourced a field blend of Mundo Novo & Catuaí cultivars, produced by a community of smallhold farmers in Chapada Diamantina. Typically, we have bought from large landowners with sprawling estates, but through Ofi sourcing we have been able to collate the work of several farmers who tend to coffee on around 20 hectares, whilst supporting a tree planting program in the community to promote biodiversity, increase shade coverage on the farms and facilitate carbon capture.
The Producers & Their Approach:
Around 30 families are ultimately responsible for growing the coffee cherries that have made their way into this community lot, named ‘Saravá’ which loosely translates to “Respect” or “Blessing”. The cultivars are Mundo Novo and Catuaí. The farms span from 900 to 1,300 metres above sea level. Joel Marques de Oliveira is one producer, whose farm Rio Brilhante is in the locale of Ibicoara. He has been motivated to pursue specialty coffee production having won awards for cup quality in 2019. Another producer is Nilson Aguiar Ferreira, who grows coffee on Fazenda Encanto up to 1,100 metres. He learnt the ropes of coffee production from his parents and has been working here since 1997.
We predominantly buy washed coffees, as we love their clarity, vibrancy and clean taste. In Brazil it is highly unusual to see any fully washed lots, with ‘pulped natural’ or honey processing more the norm and ‘natural’ or dry process also common. With our Saravá blend the harvested cherries are initially depulped and put through a demucilaginator or ‘mechanical washer’ which removes the fruit mucilage, bypassing the need for fermentation and decreasing the water requirements. The parchment is then slowly dried with a minor amount of residual mucilage present.
Offering a clean, soft cup with tonnes of sweetness and a creamy body we have been enjoying sample roasts and initial tests of this lot drunk as a single origin, which tastes round and warming. The cup profile is quite versatile and so it lends itself well to blending with other coffees that offer a little more in the way of top notes, acidity and aromatics.
The Cultivars:
Mundo Novo represents a natural cross between Typica and Bourbon that was initially noted in Brazil in the 1940s. Over the subsequent decades, breeding programs in Brazil have made refinements and selections to this tall tree, which offers a good yield and cup quality but is susceptible to leaf rust and coffee berry disease. Mundo Novo has since been cross-bred with Caturra, which itself is a dwarf mutation of Bourbon, to create Catuaí. It’s compact nature allows a denser planting, and the tree itself is quite productive. Catuaí has been far more popular in terms of spreading to other producing countries, Costa Rica in particular.
Article 2 – Workshop Select, Río Blanco, Namballe, San Ignacio, Peru
Returning as a top note component in Article for a second year, we are featuring a beautiful community coffee from the Río Blanco Coffee Growers Association in Namballe, Cajamarca.
We made selections from 19 distinct producers, growing coffee across Namballe and Piura this year, and parcelled them up into our Workshop Select and Workshop Reserve lots, so that we could release them in workable volumes across our house blends and single origin programs respectively. The 12 producing families from Namballe whose coffee is featured this year in Article are growing their coffee from around 1,550 up to 1,850 metres. Coffees from San Ignacio in the north of Peru tend to be a little more pointed and fruit driven than the other lots we source from the Huadquiña and Valle Inca associations in Cusco, with a slightly riper and more pronounced acidity. We feel this pairs very nicely with the creamier, chocolatey base note from Chapada Diamantina in Brazil.
Cultivars are primarily Typica & Bourbon, with some small lots of Caturra, Pache and San Ramon. Farm sizes are typically around 1-2 hectares and the coffee trees are planted under native Albizia and Pacay shade trees and amidst secondary food crops like yucca, citrus and bananas. All of the Río Blanco producers are working to high standards and undertaking harvest and processing methodologies in the manner typical to the region. Coffee is organically grown under shade, the coffee cherries are hand harvested via communal work in tandem with their neighbours, The cherries are manually depulped and then wet fermented between 18 and 24 hours before washing and slowly drying for around 15 days on raised beds.
