Coffee - the real taste of a place at its best

 Drinking coffee is a way to travel around the planet without leaving home . 

That's why we feel it's our job to discover the unique qualities that each coffee source brings and honor those places by bringing to market the best that can be found. From the diverse Brazil, the many family farms of Colombia, through the micro-regions of Guatemala to the various regions of Kenya.

Together with our customers and partners, we want to enjoy the diversity of the flavors of the individual regions. Our regional coffee offerings are designed to highlight the individual profiles of specific coffee growing regions around the world, from the landscape or province level down to the specific community. 

We feel these coffees showcase the true taste of place in at its best and are the way hard-working producers monetize their annual harvest, based on quality in the cup.

These coffees have been measured and scored against a set of competitive sensory parameters and we are always delighted with the results that they instantly transport us back to our favorite places and remind us of old, good friends.

The huge variety of flavors and quality that exists in individual growing regions offers unique snapshots of the impact of region, variety and processing that is specific to within a single country. 

We intend to highlight the different profiles that exist in specific micro-regions of large producing countries such as Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala and Peru.

Also in small in coffee producing countries like El Salvador and Costa Rica, we are able to source a lot of representative coffee from individual communities, allowing us to support people from a small and tight-knit geographic area while giving you access to the flavors that the combination of culture and landscape creates.

And why are we starting with coffee from Brazil? Brazil has an impressive history in coffee cultivation. The first coffee trees were brought to Brazil at the beginning of the 18th century, within 50 years they spread from the northern state of Pará in 1727 to Rio de Janeiro. At first, coffee was grown almost exclusively for domestic consumption by European colonists, but as demand for coffee in the United States and continental Europe began to increase in the early to mid-1800s, coffee supplies elsewhere in the world began to decline. Large outbreaks of coffee leaf rust virtually decimated the coffee-growing powerhouses of Java and Ceylon, making room for the burgeoning coffee industry in Central and South America. Brazil's size and the diversity of its landscapes and microclimates showed incredible production potential, and the proximity of the United States made it an obvious and convenient export-import partner for the Western market.

In 1820, Brazil already produced 30 percent of the world's coffee supply, but in 1920 it already accounted for 80 percent of the global quantity.

Since the 19th century, the weather in Brazil has been one of the liveliest topics of discussion among traders and brokers and a major determinant of global market trends and prices that affect the coffee commodity market . Frost and heavy rains have caused coffee yields to rise and fall over the past few decades, but the country holds its own as one of the top two annual producers of coffee, along with Colombia.

Another interesting things that Brazil has contributed to coffee around the world is the number of varieties, mutant hybrids and cultivars that have arisen from there, either spontaneously or by laboratory creation. Caturra (a dwarf mutation of the Bourbon variety), Maragogype (an oversized Typica derivative) and Mundo Novo (Bourbon-Typica, which is also the mother plant of Catuai, developed by Brazilian agronomists) are just a few of the seemingly countless varieties of coffee that originated in Brazil and have now spread among coffee growing countries worldwide.

In order to maintain production on the scale for which Brazil is known, the national industry has adopted specific and to some extent innovative means to achieve both collection and processing in the most efficient and organized manner and farm structures are designed to take advantage of these systems and maximize yield potential per hectare.

Strip harvesting, whether mechanical or manual, is one of the advantages commonly found on farms of all sizes in Brazil: Instead of of the laborious selective picking typical of the rest of coffee-producing America, the coffee is picked less discriminately cherry-by-cherry, but rather sorted by ripeness after a more general picking. In some cases, pickers use towels, tarps, and/or heavy gloves to simply strip the cherries from the branches at the peak of harvest and collect them in baskets, barrels, or cloth sacks. Elsewhere, on much larger farms, coffee plants are arranged in rows that more closely resemble cornfields. 

While these methods have drawn some criticism from specialty coffee circles, they have allowed Brazil to maintain its position as a formidable a source of volume and in many cases they also lend something of what is considered a classic Brazilian profile that is richer in chocolate, nutty and pulpy coffee cherry notes.

Speaking of pulpy notes, Brazilian post-harvest processing is also somewhat unique and has been adapted largely in response to a combination of productivity, climate and desired profile: Pulped Natural and Natural processing still dominates the industry here: Pulped Natural coffees are de-pulped and left to dry with the mucilage still intact; while Naturals are usually either dried on the trees before harvest (called Boya) or picked and unloaded on terraces to finish drying before peeling. Both processes tend to impart a nutty creaminess to coffees that have a more tempered fruit note than the light and acidic Washed or even Honey coffees seen elsewhere in Mesoamerica. Cafe Imports natural coffee sources from Brazil are "special preparation", picked ripe and dried on the terraces according to specification.

There is a lot of romance for us in this big, beautiful coffee country, but we are also attracted to challenges and constantly active we are looking for new ways to discover, develop and source quality coffee from our main export partners.