Origin Trip to Brazil, 2010

Coffee, cheese, and bread served at Fazendas Paraíso. Several stops on this trip included variations on this snack.

Coffee processing equipment.

The farms I visited all had some kind of irrigation. This is one way to do it.

This is another style of irrigation. There are small holes along the length of this hose to deliver water to the coffee trees.

The harvest for this coffee tree is over, but it is about to flower again.

The coffee here is flowering.

At Fazendas Água Limpa the trees are grown very tall. Most coffee farms do not allow coffee to grow this tall because it is difficult for people to reach the upper branches pick the coffee.

Once the coffee is four years old on this farm, it is harvested mechanically.

This machine goes over a row of coffee trees, agitating the tree to shake the coffee cherries loose. A conveyor at the bottom picks up the coffee.

This is the final picking for these trees, so a combination of ripe, unripe, overripe, and other bits of coffee tree are being removed. At this point, the best coffee has already been harvested. The coffee seen here will not taste as good as coffee from earlier pickings.

This is another harvester, not currently in use.

Where coffee is harvested mechanically, the rows of coffee are spaced farther apart than is often seen on farms that rely on manual harvesting.

All of the farms I visited were processing coffee with the natural or pulped natural methods. During the drying stage of these methods, there is a need to measure the moisture content of the coffee. To do this, a sample huller is used to remove the outer layers of the coffee cherry before taking the sample to a device that measures the moisture content of the coffee bean.

Both patio and mechanical drying methods were used.

In mechanical drying, coffee goes into a rotating drum and heated air is used to bring the moisture content of the coffee to the desired level.

When drying coffee on a patio, the coffee is spread thin and must be turned to ensure even drying.

The tins on the left contain samples from different lots of coffee.

This coffee is ready for evaluation, but the results of this particular cupping session cannot be considered reliable for several reasons.

A major flaw in this session is the grind. This is very uneven and there are coffee grounds that are too large to use for cupping. In a normal cupping session, there is a layer of wet coffee grounds forming a cap over the liquid coffee which traps volatile aromatic compounds. With these coffee grounds, the cap will break up before the coffee has had time to properly extract. This makes a proper evaluation of the aroma of this coffee impossible.

Coffees in this cupping session were ground properly. After evaluating the aroma, any grounds which have not sunk to the bottom of the cup must be removed before evaluating the flavor of the coffee.

This is the inside of an electronic color sorter. Coffee falls through one of several parallel channels one bean at a time. The color of each bean is measured and any which is outside of the specified range of colors is removed by a puff of air.

The beans which fail the initial color sorting are sent to an older, slower color sorter set to a looser tolerance.