La Terra (Single Origin Brazil) SCA 84.5

Country: Brazil
Region: Tres Pontas, Sul De Minas
Altitude: 1150 masl
Varieties: Yellow Bourbon
Process: Natural
Flavour Profile: Red cherry and orange with a milk chocolate and hazelnut butter finish

The Zaroca Farm has been in the Gilberto Basilio's family for over 100 years, since his grandfather Mario Brito bought the farm.

It wasn't until after the death of Dona Maria that Gilberto became full involved again as previously, he was working as an engineer. In 2015 Gilberto returned to the farm, he found it in a state of decline, with his brother Berto they began to turn the farm around. They started to replant areas of the farm with more resistant and productive varietals, such as Mundo Novo and Catuai. They also planted 4ha of Paraiso and 8Ha of yellow bourbon. Now the farm has 16 trial varietals, which they will experiment with and decide, which are best to run into production for yield and cup quality.

The farm is a total of 154 ha planted with coffee, The annual production is around 6000 bags. 60% of the crop is collected by hand due to the topography of the land. They have worked hard on treating the plants with the right care and nutrients, to help trees flourish and produce the best cherry possible for specialty production.

Gilberto has also introduced static drying boxes to help with developing the flavour profile of his coffees. Once the coffee has been picked and then separated by density and size the coffees are then allowed to dry on the patio for 8 days as an initial skin drying.

The coffee is then transferred to the drying box. These are 1 m deep boxes with capacity for 15000 litre volume of cherry which equates to 25-30 bags of green coffee. The boxes have a vented grill at the bottom to allow for air to be circulated from below up through the drying coffee.

The coffee is left to rest for 25 days before being and delivered to the Cooperative for milling.