Márcio,

I'm curious how you are getting your coffee? Minas? Do you have relationships with growers?

dan

Also the Brazilian government encourages coffee consumption in ways that would ruffle a lot of feathers in the U.S. Last year at the SCAA Symposium a representative of the Brazilian coffee industry explained how children in elementary school are given coffee breaks to develop a lifelong coffee habit.

Given the current science, it might be healthier than some of the stuff handed out in US school cafeterias.

Hello Marcio,

Its true that 2011 saw a huge jump in green been prices. The reason for that in my opinion is two fold. The first is due to the global economic situation investors found themselves putting there paper money into commodities as a whole. Coffee is included in the commodities sector.

Second, the top quality coffees are Hand Picked. There is no real way to get around this since the best coffee comes from the perfectly ripened fruits. The cost of living, which mainly includes food in the case of harvesters, has risen everywhere. So therefore it has become more expensive to produce quality coffee.

In Brasil much of the coffee now is harvested using mechanized harvesters. This does not provide the gourmet coffee that contains the superior flavors but it is important to keep the costs down for instant coffee products.

Also as pressure is being put on the Brazilian government to discourage amazon rainforest depletion in the sugar cane industry the price of coffee needs to rise to compensate the traditional cane growers to change there crop.
There are a lot of things going on here at the same time that affect the price of coffee. But every high tide has an end. Prices will begin to drop from the peaks but dont expect them to return to the way it was 10 years ago when you could spend 1$ a kilo for coffee.

Carneiro wrote:Crazy, but it's hard to get green coffee around here - at least in small quantity.

Márcio,
For real?
OO

gourmetcoffee wrote:In Brasil much of the coffee now is harvested using mechanized harvesters. This does not provide the gourmet coffee that contains the superior flavors but it is important to keep the costs down for instant coffee products.

This is somewhat misleading. The top Facendas, like Facenda Vista Allegre or Daterra use very sophisticated color sorters to collect the ripe cherries after they have been strip harvested.

The traditional reason for the lower quality of Brazilian coffees is their being low grown and grown in the sun, rather than in the shade, in an upland rain forest with its own microclimate and terroir. The use of high tech processing, including color sorting and very advanced semi wet preps has to some extent compensated; in the same way high tech processing creates an edge for California wines, even from less favored regions.

The new "designer Brazils" have good acidity and fruit. My guess is if you put a top Daterra yellow bourbon on a cupping table along with centrals priced at the same level; there would be some red faces among any group of expert cuppers asked to spot the Brazil.