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.
For filter brewing we recommended using 70g of coffee per litre of water. For espresso brewing we recommend a dose of 18g pulled to 36g in 30 seconds. This coffee balances very well with milk.
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, Peru
The four lots currently comprising the Peruvian coffee in our house blend are from Altagracias Pusma Cruz, Desilio Campos Odeja, Nelida Garcia Togas and Ursulo Maira Garcia. Their coffee farms are named, respectively, El Limon, La Piña, La Mandarina and Los Laureles. El Limon is situated around 1,700 metres in Huancabamba, Piura region. Altagracias has been farming here since she was 22 years old and is working with her family on their 2 hectare farm to produce Caturra, Typica, Bourbon, Pache and Catimor amongst Albizia and Pacay shade trees. Her neighbour in Huancabamba is Nelida, whose 1.25 hectare farm Los Laureles is at 1,510 metres, planted with Caturra and Typica amidst native shade trees. Nelida has been working in coffee her entire life and places great emphasis on working in harmony with nature, preserving biodiversity on the farm. La Piña is in La Zunga, at 1,458 metres in San Ignacio. Desilio who runs the farm has been in coffee production his entire life, and the 1 hectare farm produces bananas and yucca as well as Caturra and Typica cultivars of coffee. Finally, La Mandarina is also close by in Carmen de la Frontera. Ursulo also plants food crops for subsistence and has Bourbon and Caturra trees growing under shade which are intercropped with citrus. The 2 hectare farm is situated at 1,726 metres.
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. It is not the norm to feature such small single farmer lots in a house blend, but through Red Fox Coffee Merchants we were able to make these smaller purchases and subsequently use them alongside a solid Brazilian base coffee to produce a coffee that we think is really balanced and delicious whilst also reflecting growers whose coffee typically gets bundled into anonymised community lots.
