Coffee appreciates in the mountains of ES after adapting cultivation – 08/16/2023 – Café na Prensa

Brazil has more than 30 coffee producing regions, each with its own characteristics and peculiarities. Some generate sweeter drinks, others with more almond notes, others more fruity and exotic, etc.

If you ask a professional taster which of them produce the most complex coffees, it is almost certain that the mountains of Espírito Santo are on the list. As shown in the first chapter of the series of reports on coffees in the region, geoclimatic conditions are the main reasons for this.

But it was not always so. Until the 1990s, the region cultivated commodity coffee – that is, beans used to produce traditional drinks, not gourmet ones. Until, in 1996, Senar (National Service for Rural Learning) hired a consultant to analyze the potential of coffee in the region and teach courses for farmers.

The mission caught the attention of Evair de Melo, a recent graduate of agronomy technician, who is now a federal deputy for the PP. At the end of the course offered by Senar, Melo decided to continue the work and began traveling around the region in order to educate and help farmers.

As a result, more and more farmers have started to plant specialty coffee, which involves more attention to detail but produces a higher quality bean and, consequently, a higher price.

Melo then began to publicize the findings and help register coffees in the region in competitions, such as those of BSCA – the association that represents specialty coffee producers in Brazil.

At the turn of the century, recognition began to appear, albeit slowly. Grains grown in the mountains of Espírito Santo began to appear among the finalists of the main contests in Brazil.

In 2003, barista Isabela Raposeiras, who at the time was beginning her journey in the field of specialty coffees, participated in a fair in Chicago where she tasted high-quality drinks. Soon after returning, she tasted, for the first time, coffee from the mountains of Espírito Santo.

“I remember being very shocked at that tasting table. It really was a coffee that had notes of African coffee. I remember thinking that day: ‘this is going to be proof that we have coffee at the same level as these places of the world'”, says Raposeiras.

Six years later, when he opened his coffee shop in São Paulo, the Coffee Lab, Raposeiras didn’t think twice: he bought coffee grown in the mountains of Espírito Santo.

Since then, she has become a promoter of coffees in the region. At an event by the SCA –an entity that represents the North American specialty coffee sector–, Raposeiras sent beans from the mountains of Espírito Santo for a blind tasting.

Tasters loved the coffee and thought they were drinking coffee from Kenya – a country famous for producing beans with very fruity and complex profiles. “When they said it was a coffee from Brazil, nobody believed it. And that’s when the buzz around that region began”, says Raposeiras.

The recognition brought economic advantages to those small farmers. Producers who once sold their bags for R$ 350 –each bag has 60 kg of green coffee– started to charge more than R$ 1,000 at the time.

Farmers who were previously subject to prices imposed by exporters now choose how much they want to charge. Currently, several producers in the region sell their good lots for prices ranging from R$2,500 to R$3,000 – a bag of traditional Arabica today costs less than R$900.

But that didn’t scare away buyers. On the contrary, they want loyalty and long contracts, says Melo. “Currently the big coffees are not even going to competitions anymore because the companies anticipated and already made contracts for several vintages”.

VALUATION KEEP YOUNG PEOPLE IN THE FIELD

At the same time that it emancipated the producer, the appreciation of the region’s coffees brought a perspective to the new generations, who previously only thought about migrating to the city. Now, there are young people choosing to stay in the countryside and work with specialty coffees.

This is the case of the four young people from a family of farmers who decided to unite in order to create a company to sell the coffee produced not only on their properties, but on other sites in the region.

That’s how Farmers Coffee was born. Despite having less than four years of existence, the trader created by friends Dério Brioschi Junior, 27, João Paulo Marcate, 27, Luiz Henrique Pimenta, 27, and Phelipe Brioschi, 24, already exports coffee from more than 300 local farmers to several parts of the world.

Another who decided to stay in the mountains of Espírito Santo to work with coffee was Felipe Estevão, 24. After studying food science and technology at Ifes (Federal Institute of Espírito Santo), in Venda Nova do Imigrante, he decided to delve into the subject and today he is Q -Grader (professional coffee evaluator) and responsible for the quality of the beans from the Camocim farm, one of the largest in the region, which produces the famous jacu coffee.

Now, Evair de Melo, who almost 30 years ago helped to transform coffee growing in the region, sees his son, aged 17, taking an interest in coffee and improving his knowledge through courses and events.

The characters change, and the history of coffee in the Espírito Santo mountains continues.

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