The Selective Harvest Project
This month we feature the coffees of three friends and long-time partners of Casa Brasil Coffees: Alessandro Hervaz, Ademílson Neumann, and Augusto Borges. Our partnership began when an extended study of the Mantiqueira de Minas region showed that their microregion was quite propitious for producing high-quality coffee.
In 2016, after working together for several years, we decided to try something quite novel for Brazilian coffee: a selective harvest. Brazilian coffee faces a “good” problem in that wages for picking the coffee are quite high. So much so that the labor cost of manual selective harvesting of only ripe fruits usually exceeds the value of the harvested coffee. To ensure a return on the growers’ investment, we guaranteed a high set price for the coffee that would more than compensate for the increased labor costs. The results have been amazing, and they have performed a selective harvest every year since. Ademílson won the Fair Trade competition for the best Fair Trade–certified coffee in Brazil in 2017, and the three growers have become well-known in the Brazilian specialty coffee industry for their consistently high-quality coffees.