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Brazil is the largest coffee producer in the world, with coffee beans of every grade and type. Brazil's domestic coffee consumption accounts for one third of the global total, and Brazil also holds a place in the global coffee trading market. Although Brazil faces natural disasters several times more often than other regions, its plantable area is already enough to make up for it. However, just a little news of natural or man-made disasters in Brazil is enough to cause price fluctuations in the world coffee futures market.

Brazilian coffee beans' current status was achieved through more than three hundred years of effort. As is well known, coffee originated in Ethiopia, and later, because Europeans' demand for coffee grew and their footprints spread wider and wider, coffee beans were able to travel all the way around the globe.

The history of Brazilian coffee beans can be traced back as early as the 1720s, when a Portuguese naval officer was ordered to go to the island of Guiana to handle a land dispute between France and the Netherlands, but the officer fell in love with the wife of the local governor of Cayenne. When he was about to set off on his return journey, the governor's wife, to express her admiration and longing, gave him a bouquet of flowers, in which coffee tree seeds were hidden. After coffee arrived in Brazil, it quickly adapted to the local environment and thrived, spreading across most of Brazil's states.

For Brazilian coffee beans to have achieved such rapid growth in production, the United States must be mentioned. Because the United States wanted to break free from the rule of the British crown, it dumped all the tea that the British loved most and designated coffee as a patriotic beverage. The number of coffeehouses in the United States grew, and demand for Brazilian coffee beans surged along with it. Coffee brought enormous economic benefits to Brazil, allowing railways to run directly to the coffee plantations and making the transport process far more convenient.

Afterward, the American Civil War broke out within the United States, and coffee became a military necessity, further expanding demand for Brazilian coffee beans. However, at the time the main variety of Brazilian coffee beans was Typica; although the Typica variety has an elegant flavor, its yield is relatively low. So some people set out on a journey to find high-yield coffee varieties, and the Bourbon coffee variety from Reunion Island was introduced to Brazil. By the 1870s, Bourbon had become the main variety of Brazilian coffee beans.

On FrontStreet Coffee's bean list there are two coffees from Brazil, both of them Bourbon varieties. The soft-bean profile of Brazilian coffee, smooth on entry with gentle acidity, is already widely known, and that soft-bean profile is also the characteristic taste of Brazilian coffee beans. This is because coffee cultivation in Brazil mostly uses sun-exposed growing methods; the coffee fruit needs to absorb a certain amount of heat as it grows, and the coffee trees are directly exposed to the sun, allowing the coffee fruit to quickly obtain a certain amount of heat and ripen in a shorter time, which causes the coffee beans to have a relatively soft bean density. If you have ever tried grinding Brazilian coffee beans and Ethiopian coffee beans with a hand grinder, you can feel it: when grinding Brazilian coffee beans, the resistance you meet is not great.

On FrontStreet's bean list, the Brazilian Red Bourbon is included in the everyday-drinking bean series. The original intention behind FrontStreet's everyday-drinking bean series was to let many coffee beginners quickly grasp the basic flavor of each production region at a higher cost-performance ratio, thereby discovering the flavor characteristics of each region. FrontStreet's Brazilian everyday-drinking bean is selected from Minas Gerais, the largest coffee-producing state in Brazil, and its sub-region Cerrado is the first coffee-producing region in Brazil to obtain Brazilian origin coffee certification.

The everyday-drinking bean series mostly uses the washed processing method. Through years of cupping many coffee beans, FrontStreet has found that washed coffees have flavors closer to the basic flavor of the production region, while the natural processing method adds fruity notes to the aroma along with a more intense sweetness and a fuller body.

FrontStreet Coffee Brazil Red Bourbon Coffee Beans

Region: Cerrado, Minas Gerais, Brazil

Altitude: 1000 m

Variety: Red Bourbon

Processing Method: Pulped Natural

However, the Brazil Red Bourbon coffee beans in FrontStreet's everyday beans series use its traditional pulped natural processing method. This method came about because in the 1990s, the Brazilian authorities, wanting to export more coffee beans, sought to adopt the washed processing method, but Brazil had neither sufficient water resources nor enough funds locally, so the pulped natural method (Pulped Natural) was derived. The skin and pulp of the coffee fruit are removed, and the sticky parchment beans with the mucilage layer still attached are dried in the sun, which shortens the time needed for drying and also improves the quality of the green beans.

Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed that Brazil's pulped natural process is very similar to the later honey process. In fact, Costa Rica's famous honey process was also derived from Brazil's pulped natural process.

Because Qianjie's Red Bourbon coffee beans use the pulped natural process, part of the mucilage is retained during drying, allowing more sugars to penetrate into the green coffee beans. This Brazil Cerrado coffee bean likewise features a rich nutty aroma and a creamy, silky, full-bodied mouthfeel.

Another coffee bean on Qianjie's menu comes from one of Brazil's other oldest coffee-growing regions - Sao Paulo State. This coffee bean from Sao Paulo State is a Yellow Bourbon coffee bean from Fazenda Rainha. Since the first Cup of Excellence (COE) competition in Brazil in 1999, Fazenda Rainha has won awards many times over many years, with a record of 12 wins in 7 years.

FrontStreet Coffee Brazil Fazenda Rainha Coffee Beans

Region: Mogiana Region, Sao Paulo State, Brazil

Estate: Fazenda Rainha

Altitude: 1400m - 1950m

Variety: Yellow Bourbon

Processing Method: Natural

The estate has a planted area of more than 280 hectares, but more than 200 hectares are planted with the lower-yielding yet better-flavored Yellow Bourbon variety. Yellow Bourbon is a natural mutation of Red Bourbon, discovered in Sao Paulo State in 1871. Later scientific verification found that this variety has a thicker mucilage layer, and the mucilage layer is rich in saccharides.

This Yellow Bourbon coffee from Fazenda Rainha offered by FrontStreet uses the natural processing method. Compared with Brazil's traditional semi-washed method, the natural method requires more labor and time costs, and large-batch natural processing makes it difficult to guarantee the quality of green coffee beans. Fazenda Rainha adopts small-scale natural processing; workers turn the cherries frequently to minimize the chance of unpleasant acidity and fermented flavors, while placing the coffee cherries on raised beds away from the ground to avoid picking up the taste of soil. Naturally processed Yellow Bourbon makes the already distinctly sweet Yellow Bourbon coffee even sweeter and more delicious.

When roasting these two Brazilian coffees, FrontStreet used a medium-dark roast level in order to highlight the soft acidity, nutty notes and full body of Brazilian coffee beans. When brewing, FrontStreet recommends using a water temperature of 88°C, a medium-coarse grind size, and a KONO dripper with a three-stage pouring method.

Dripper: KONO dripper

Water temperature: 88°C

Dose: 15 g

Coffee-to-water ratio: 1:15

Grind size: 75% passing through a China standard No. 20 sieve

[Brazil Red Bourbon] Rich nutty and chocolate flavors, caramel sweetness, a smooth and silky mouthfeel, and an overall balance.

[Brazil Queen] Rich nutty flavor, with a clean sucrose sweetness, a faint lemon aroma, a dark chocolate finish, a rich and lively layering, and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.