Last month we visited Carmo Coffees (the exporter we work with) in Brazil to see the beginning of this year’s harvest. Brazil is the largest coffee producing country in the world, in terms of both land mass and crop size. The harvest this year is projected to be around 70 million bags (each bag contains 60kgs) of green coffee, which is around 40% of the annual world crop. We stay in the beautiful town of São Laurenço in Minas Gerais when we visit; it is a popular place to escape the heat of São Paulo or Rio de Janerio and is known for its Parque das Águas which has nine mineral water springs. This year the town was celebrating two events while we were there – Corpus Christi and the festival of Cachaça.
One of the many highlights of this trip was our first visit to Sítio Irmãos Piazza Leite. The farm is owned by two brothers, Marcilio Piazza Leite and Marino Piazza Leite, who inherited the land from their mother, Clarisse’s, family. Clarisse is still very much involved in the family business, as well as making fresh cheese from the house cows, and crocheting cushion covers and table runners. We spent time with the farm manager José Francisco López (Zezé) who took us up into the plots where the coffee is planted. The farm is on one side of the highest hills in the area and has all day sun. Banana is used to shade the coffee at the lower areas, and citrus is used in the higher areas – both crops give additional income to the farm.
Marcilio and Marino send their coffee to the Pedra Branca mill in Pedralva for processing. The mill is quite close and accepts daily deliveries during the week from hundreds of farms in the area. The farms which deliver cherry to Pedra Branca are usually quite small, without much room for a mill of their own, or land on which to build drying patios. The mill is run by Rinaldo de Castro Junqueira (Pipoca). Pipoca sold his farm (Fazenda Furnas) a few years ago to concentrate on running the mill for Carmo Coffees. There are some terrific farms and great coffees in the area such as Piazza Leite and the work that Pipoca and the team at Pedra Branca do, help us find them.
Another highlight was our visit to Cria Carmo. Cria Carmo is a project that we have supported since we started buying coffee from the Carmo group. The Cria team provides local children with an after-school club where the students can focus on four different activities: chess, English, football, and swimming. We were delighted to see a chess skills demonstration, participate in English practice, watch various football drills, and were treated to an impressive display of all four swimming strokes. The project currently has 165 children enrolled ranging in age from 7 to 17. See Carmo’s website for more information about Cria Carmo.
It was a super trip to Brazil to see the start of this year’s harvest. There is plenty of cherry on the tree beginning to ripen and some coffee was already being processed while we were there. The full flush of the crop is expected this month, and we will be returning later this year to select our coffees from this harvest. We expect these coffees to arrive before Christmas.
Monmouth x