Brazilian Sítio Maranhão
Brazilian Sítio Maranhão
Many of you may know how tough the last Brazilian harvest was. Yields are down, and it wasn’t the best quality ever. Although it pains me to write this, part of my job is to (subjectively) hate what we do. It keeps our feet on the ground and egos in check.
I would say that this is a decent crop and is tasting good. It’s not the best year ever, either. Ironically, this may well please more people.
Now my job. To introduce this delicious single-farm coffee to you, which I am completely involved and biased about!
Top Trumps
Farm: Brazilian Sítio Maranhão
Farmer/family: Jose & Claiton Delgado,
Region: Caldas, Minas Gerais, South Minas
Process: Pulped Natural
Varietals: Red Catucai and Yellow Catucia
Roast: One Roast
Altitude: 1100-1200 Meters above sea level.
Cup Potential 🍜
|Aromatics: Chocolate and a promise of Fruit| Body: Light to medium| Acidity: White Currants, white grape|
Aromatically, you just know this is going to be chocolatey. From the off, this old favourite is chocolate forward. Dark chocolate and cocoa dominate, with a soft, sweet white currant acidity, adding another dimension. The subtle, sweet fruit builds and becomes a lot more interesting than where we started. On cooling, the coffee is like white grape and dark chocolate.
60g of coffee per litre is a great place to start.
Farm Stuff
Sitio Maranhao is a small farm, not far from the entrance to Pocos de Caldas, in Minas Gerais. The move to specialty coffee has been over recent years and is painstaking work. The coffee harvest is only part of the years’ work. As soon as the harvest is complete there is a whole host of other things to attend to, but at least the workload reduces a little. Between Claiton and Jose, they are ingenious and very resourceful, making systems where they re-use motors for different parts of the coffee processing.
All of the pickings are selective, meaning that every bean that you buy has been picked by a member of the Delgado family when it is ripe. There can be 4 or 5 passes (pickings) across the harvest, none of the automated machine scale here. On top of this, I doubt a harvester could even make it up the steep, steep slopes.
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