2014 Harvest

These pictures tell the story of direct trade.

A farmer carefully loading his beans onto a truck headed for the airport.

It was once thought not possible for a small independent farmer to manage such a feat. Higino stands proudly with his first exportation bound for America.

A little boy in Brazil sees it happen…and now knows it is possible.

A little girl in America shows her joy that she is part of a story that is changing trade.

The Beans Have Arrived! Help Support Direct Trade…Change Starts with the First 5000 Bags! 

Harvest update

“It’s finally harvest time!

The coffee cherries are ready to be picked and the workers ready to get started. We started on Tuesday (06/03) with a beautiful day and no rain to stop us.
Our coffee is hand picked, in a process we call coffee stripping. This process consists in removing all the fruit from a branch at one time. For that, we place under the coffee plants a big bag to hold all the fruit that will fall. After finished with a couple of coffee plants, the worker will pick through those fruit taking out the leaves, impurities and under-ripe cherries.

At the end of the day we had a truck full of coffee cherries (and that’s just the beginning)!”
Higino Magrinelli Neto

“It’s almost May, and we can already observe the maturation of the coffee beans going from green,
to cherry color.  As we have more than one floration at our crop ,an irregular maturation of the same occurs, as
seen in the pictures.

We are also ending the “coffee streets cleaning” to initiate, in late May, the coffee harvest.”

Higino Magrinelli Neto

Our updated website with our new online store is here! We are officially taking orders for our next roast that will be ready to ship on April 18th. We are still in pre-harvest, so quantities are quite limited. Don’t miss out…place your order now! Stay tuned for our April harvest update coming soon. We are getting close to harvest count down!

“Right now we’re getting ready for this year’s harvest, that should begin in May! We’re finishing getting the fields cleaned up for the harvesters. Our beans are 100% handpicked, so the cleaner the isles in the coffee plantation, the easier it is for the harvesters do their jobs. Despite the adverse weather conditions, which caused the loss of some part of the harvest for some farmers, our coffee plants are doing well. The coffee beans are growing beautifully, surprising us with a great production in our crops!” – Higino Magrinelli Neto

(These pictures were taken on March 10th, 2014)

(These pictures were taken yesterday (February 8th). )”The weather in our region today is hot and dry, with temperatures reaching a maximum of 33 Celsius degrees (91.4F). In this stage, the coffee plantation needs a lot of water (rain), because the beans are still in process of formation. The lack of rain has harmed some regions in the states of São Paulo and Minas Gerais. But that is not the case of our region, since we had a nice volume of rain at the end of December.” – Higino Magrinelli Neto<

Our very first artisan roast! After a detailed consultation with our artisan about what “notes” we are looking to bring out from our beans, we created our own unique roast! The whole process is just amazing! The result today is a unique medium roast that we will call “medio” which is Portuguese for medium. This picture is of the beans just as they dropped out of the roaster into the cooling tray.

Next we developed our “Ponto” roast. This is a profile inspired by Higino. When roasting his beans, with his village roaster, he always asks them to be roasted “to the point”. He describes this as the perfect point between a medium and dark roast. We have been drinking his perfect “to the point” roast for years and it is the inspiration behind the formation of our company.

We were so privileged to be able to collaborate with a very talented artist, Stacey Grainger, who created our original artwork by hand. The inspiration behind our label, is of course that Matt and I are the proud parents of three amazingly beautiful girls! We have a long history of girls in the family, my grandmother , my mother and myself were one of three girls. We were drawn to the art-deco style in particular because of the significance of the era.  This style combines traditional craft motifs with more modern imagery. We felt this fit in with our model of taking a craft, like coffee roasting, done for centuries and refining it with “modern perfection”.

 
Stacey was awesome to work with and is incredibly talented! Please visit her website to learn more about her and her amazing work!  www.ruby-door.com

Just a few weeks ago, Higino (our farmer), sent us 44 lbs of green beans so we could get to work developing our roast profiles with our artisan roaster in Seattle.  The beans arrived today, directly from the farm to our front door! We have our first profile development session with our artisan soon! Stay tuned!