Specialty Coffee production is about principles, not recipes.

Lessons learned in Guatemala applied to coffee production in Brazil.

Lucca Cafes Especiais in Curitiba, Brazil.

My name is Josué Morales, and I have been working in the specialty coffee industry since 2003. 

I knew I had learned Portuguese the day I found myself running a farm in the rural area of Brazil, but before any of that happened, Love brought me to Brazil in April of 2013. I had met the love of my life and she happened to live half of the world away from where I was. 

Without going into the romantic part of the story, I want to concentrate on what it meant to me, as a coffee professional visiting Carolina in Curitiba for the first time. Like many of you, I found myself searching the map for that town the first time I heard about it. It's in this town where Carolina’s family grew and developed the concept of Lucca Cafes Especiais, the first specialty coffee roastery in Brazil. 

For years I had believed that high quality specialty coffee was something that just wasn’t produced in Brazil. Carolina taught me little by little about the amazing coffee she was sourcing for Lucca, where her mother Georgia, would roast these coffees to a level of perfection I had seldom encountered before. 

I was conflicted and intrigued at all the things I was learning at Lucca in Brazil. I was used to coffee grown at high altitudes in Guatemala, but in Brazil they were grown at high latitudes, having light exposure and atmospheric pressure as a determining factor to their taste. 

It was at Lucca that I first met Marco Cravo, a coffee producer from North Paraná, with whom we became friends. We would often have coffee together in the afternoons while Carolina worked with her mother. As our friendship grew I became more curious about the coffee he produced. 

Marco seemed very disappointed about his coffee and his farm. He described to me North Paraná as having the worst reputation for quality in Brazil because of its risk of frosts, its low temperatures and its latitude. This was a place where coffee production was different to the rest of Brazil. 

In North Paraná the coffee trees flower multiple times because of scattered rains, so ripening on the trees does not happen in a uniform way. It rains during harvest, the soil is very old and very fertile, but that also makes it very muddy and complicated to navigate. One thing after another he was describing more the reality of what I was used to experiencing in Guatemala. I was intrigued. 

Marco Cravo and Josue Morales at Fazenda Pilar. January 6th, 2015.

During my second visit to Curitiba we coordinated a visit to Marco at Pilar, I wanted to see for myself what coffee farms looked like in Brazil, especially one in a region so complicated. 

Fazenda Pilar is 180 times larger than the farm where I produce coffee in Antigua Guatemala. 

I could barely grasp the dimension of things the first time I visited. However that did not stop me three years later when Marco gave me the opportunity to implement my system in a place where absolutely everything was different to what I was used to. 

The premise was the following: arrive at Fazenda Pilar to do something extraordinary. It was June 2017 when it finally happened. It was a race against time, if I couldn’t prove that the farm had the potential of producing high quality coffee that could sell for better prices, it would be converted into soy and corn plantations that were more profitable. 

I had arrived late, there were only ten days of harvest left, and the worst portion of coffee was the only thing left to harvest. 

I remember driving straight to the farm upon landing in Brazil. I had been traveling for over thirty straight hours, jet lagged, dirty, and tired from all the travel. Crossing the gate I had already noticed the mistakes that were being made in the drying patio. It was noon when I arrived, and after having lunch with the staff it took me the remainder of that day and night to turn that farm completely upside down. 

Fazenda Pilar has an impressive infrastructure and I was determined to take it to the limit. There is a machine for everything in Brazil, different to Guatemala where most of everything done is still manual labor. 

I had a crew of ten people to work with. They understood during the first few hours of our interactions the urgency involved in creating a completely different parameter of quality to the one they had been taught. 

Josue Morales (far right) and The Crew at Fazenda Pilar. June 30th, 2017.

In the course of the following two weeks the guys at Fazenda Pilar and I experienced some of the most intense and extraordinary days I’ve had in my career as a coffee professional. The learning curve that this team endured during those days encapsulated the knowledge from everything I had learned in the prior fourteen years of my life. 

I was there to achieve quality, and to make history. 

In Brazil quality meant the way the processes are organized, it meant efficiencies in the process, it meant yields and volumes obtained from the intensive farming of the land. Quality is synonymous with the standardization on how coffee should be produced to obtain a homogeneous product, instead of one that is unique. 

Brazilian coffee production answers in essence to the necessary behavior to produce a high volume commodity, and in the minds of most producers, coffee is just another crop to make revenue off the land, no different to corn, or soy, or cattle. 

From the point of view of efficiency, the work of this farm is impeccable. In a farm whose only focus were high yields and efficiencies, the transformation to achieve the production of high quality specialty coffee was almost impossible. The reason being that the process of quality is more than often a process that is counter intuitive. 

The installed capacity of a factory is determined by the output of its slowest machine or process. I often say that the people who build the machines for coffee processing are really good at making machines, but really bad at understanding coffee. When the right processes are placed in the right line of priority, the factories that were once thought to have excess capacity become constrained and cannot produce the output that was thought to be possible. 

Coffee harvesting in Brazil is done with machines and not by hand. The nature of the size of plantations in Brazil requires the harvest process to be this way because all the coffee often ripens at similar intervals. 

The size of the beast wasn’t what scared me, I was used to managing similar volumes inbound into Beneficio La Esperanza in Antigua Guatemala every night. What worried me was the fact that we were adding one additional process that is not part of the coffee culture in Brazil. The process of fermentation. 

The norm in Brazil is that, as the coffee harvesting machines make their way through the fields, coffee is collected in containers. As these containers become full they are taken to the place where they empty the coffee cherries to be processed and dried. This is done one at a time. 

In the process of fermentation coffee from one day’s picking shouldn’t be added to the tank where it ferments at different intervals, it should all progress at the same pace. So instead of having the whole day to process one container at a time, the first thing I changed was that all coffee picked in the day was to be processed at the same time. 

What seemed to be a very capable processing area became a bottleneck, and instead of having a normal schedule we were working 24 hours a day. 

The washing station at Fazenda Pilar.

Brazil has very strict labor laws and Marco at Fazenda Pilar is very strict about the way in which these laws are enforced at farm level. Everyone is treated and paid very well, they are provided with housing, meals, and are asked to work the hours they are hired for and only that. So the system I was bringing to the farm was inconceivable! 

This did not stop me. I had ten days, and the first one was over, there was no time to do things any other way. I let Marco figure out how to run a very expensive system of extra hours.

In the meantime, I carried on. That night, as the first batch of coffee flowed into the tank where it would be fermented for the next day or two, the whole team had become completely invigorated with the prospect of experimenting something new and different to everything they had tried before. 

The first day had been warm and sunny and a complete success, on the second day, things started to get weary with North Paraná behaving the way it has to. It was winter and we were below the tropic of Capricorn. A cold front came in. 

By the afternoon of the third day I had adapted the principles of my system to fit the conditions at Fazenda Pilar. I didn't just come to implement whatever process I was doing in Guatemala, I had invented a system that answered to the needs of this region. A new way to wash the coffee from the process of fermentation. 

The day we washed the first lot and placed it out on the patio it was pouring rain. 

I could see the faces of panic in everyone around me as rain falling on coffee was said to be its major recipe for disaster. It wasn’t. We continued through the rainy days and into days that temperature dropped to almost freezing. 

There was not a single cloud in the bright blue sky with a blazing Sun that wouldn’t warm up at all. Drying was immediately adapted to continue in mechanical dryers, and we continued to focus on the volume coming in.

Machine for the mechanical harvesting of coffee. Fazenda Pilar.

The mechanical pickers were sliding because of mud out in the fields, but the harvesting needed to continue to save the remaining ripe coffee cherries, especially after the rain.

It had been nine days since I arrived at Fazenda Pilar by the time we got to try the first finished lot of coffee produced with my system. The coffee looked, felt, and tasted like no coffee we had ever tried, it was something new. 

I interpreted that tasting as the first time we were actually tasting the coffee of North Paraná the way it should be, expressing the natural qualities the region has to offer. 

That coffee went on to be recognized as the best in the region that year, and to be chosen as the official coffee for the Brazilian Roasting Competition. 

As I flew back to Guatemala I reflected on my days at Fazenda Pilar. Far from being a mission accomplished, we had barely started to scratch the surface.