Explore Brazil: March 2023

This month we Explore Brazil with our Alquimista Blend, the Cerrado Mineiro region, and our partner Deyvid Leandro.

 Brazilian Blend: Alquimista Espresso Blend

This month we feature Alquimista, our espresso blend designed to bring the best of Brazil to your demitasse. With their sweetness, full body, and chocolatey notes, Brazilian coffees have long served as a base for great espressos, and it these elements that, when combined with the clean brightness notes from higher altitude pulped natural and full washed coffees, provide a noble blend–balanced with the low notes of chocolate and caramel and the high notes of citric orange. 

And speaking of alchemy, we have some Brazilian alchemy to go with your Alquimista. don’t Our Spotify playlist this month features one of our favorites, Jorge Ben Jor, and his Os Alquimistas Estão Chegando (for the full “alquimista” experience, check out this low-resolution video clip).   And, of course, you can enjoy Alquimista while reading Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist (O Alquimista). Before achieving international fame with this book, Coelho was a songwriter here in Brazil, working with rock legend Raul Seixas. Here’s a reenactment of their songwriting from the film biographical film Não Pare na Pista.

Regional Blend: Cerrado Mineiro

In the Cerrado Mineiro, an innovative spirit combined with the perfect climate to form one of the best coffee-growing regions in the world. The long, dry winters allow for harvesting and drying of the coffee with minimal rainfall. This is important since rains not only impede drying but can also impact the quality of the coffee in the field by knocking ripe fruit onto the ground and hastening fruit maturation. This period of drought also leads to a large water deficit in the plant, which, when broken by spring rains, breaks bud dormancy and leads to more homogeneous maturation. (Countries around the equator tend to have rainfalls throughout the year, meaning the plant constantly has fruit with different levels of maturation.)

But it is particularly the innovation in the Cerrado Mineiro over the past decade that has led to a major paradigm shift. Whereas Cerrado coffees have long been known for their quality, especially as a key base component of espresso blends, innovations in post-harvest processing—such as fermentation and drying–have allowed growers to bring unique flavors to the cup. This, combined with the favorable climate, has turned farms from the Cerrado into perennial contenders in the Cup of Excellence competition, whereas previously, they seemed to be condemned to the “also ran” category. Growers such as Casa Brasil Cofffee’s partners Gabriel Nunes, Chico Guimarães, Daterra Farm, and this month’s featured grower Deyvid Leandro not only offer great chocolatey and caramel coffees but a portfolio of unique flavor profiles from various combinations of cultivars and processing methods.

Featured Grower: Deyvid Leandro

Deyvid Leandro is one of Brazil’s top “coffee makers. ” A coffee maker is the person who, like a winemaker, stands between the harvest and the final product. On one side, they understand the raw material: coffee at the plant and fruit level. On the other side, they are aware of industry trends and consumer demands, Their job is to bridge the two, taking the realities of each harvest and transforming it into diverse flavors that maximize the quality and profitability of a farm.  It takes knowledge but also years of experience. Mike Tyson famously said, “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” A great coffee maker must approach each harvest with a plan but then be able to pivot depending on what is thrown their way, which can be situations as diverse as a forecast for rainfall, a pulper breaking, to a lack of labor for harvesting the coffee.

Deyvid Leandro in Austin, Texas, showing how to use the Cerrado Mineiro’s traceability system.

A native of Campos Altos, Deyvid lived many years abroad and understands well the North American coffee market, regularly visiting to keep up-to-date. And having spent well over a decade working in the coffee industry in the Cerrado Mineiro in diverse quality control roles, he also understands well the agronomical and post-harvest processing side of coffee. Over the years, he has made a name for himself, culminating in a  partnership with DBarbosa Coffees that led to a Cup of Excellence win in 2021. This year we proudly feature a unique lot from Deyvid’s own farm in Campos Altos, Minas Gerais.