Coffee

The coffee

For a while now, Christoph – the founder of Horizonte Coffee – has been under some pressure from his Brazilian wife Andrea to offer beans from her home country, which happens to be the biggest producer of coffee in the world.

We took our time though, because we wanted to find a small farm (in the Brazilian context) which produces beans of extraordinary quality and with a taste profile that is very “casual” – in other words, a taste that any coffee lover might enjoy at any given time.

With our newly christened Casual beans we not only found a coffee from Andrea’s home state of Minas Gerais, but we also discovered a super-creamy, low acidity coffee with delicious milk chocolate and biscuit undertones. No crazy flavours – just a simple, very pleasurable, easy-drinking experience.

This coffee is naturally processed. After harvesting, the ripe cherries are dried for around two weeks in the sun on patios. Once the cherries have dried out sufficiently to reach an optimal moisture content, they are allowed to “rest” or settle in a cool, dry environment. Finally, after the dried cherry and parchment have been removed in a dry-milling process, the beans are selected for quality and graded by size before being bagged for export from the nearby port of Santos, which is about 250km south of Rio de Janeiro.

The producer

Coffee first began to be cultivated in the Cerrado – Brazil’s tropical savannah – in the 1970s. From the very beginning, coffee growers invested in high quality beans and were pioneers in the production of speciality coffee. Nominato Ferreira de Oliveira was one of them, and even though he’s not the youngest any more he still has a very hands-on approach – especially with quality control – while also enjoying plenty of help and input from his five children. Nominato’s 24-hectare farm produces approximately 700 bags of coffee a year. Because of his location in the Cerrado, which usually features dry weather during harvest season, Nominato faces fewer problems with humidity during post-harvest processing than many other South American growers.