Product Overview
The Coffee
Region: Cerrado Mineiro
Varietal(s): Catuai, Mundo Novo
Processing method: Natural Sun Dried
Elevation: >1200 masl
The Story
Monte Carmelo is our take on a classic profile from a classic region: the Cerrado Mineiro. Our goal with this coffee is to have a consistent profile making this a coffee that you can rely on year-round.
Coffee was first cultivated in Cerrado Mineiro in the 1970s by farmers from ParanaÌ and São Paulo. Through a technique that corrects soil acidity (liming) and irrigation, large-scale cultivation has become possible. has around 4,500 farmers cultivating a combined area of 210,000ha. The Cerrado Mineiro presents a dry climate during the harvest period, which causes the coffee to suffer less from humidity after harvesting, allowing for a consistent drying process. The region, which covers 55 municipalities in total, achieved the Denomination of Origin in 2013 and was the first region in the country to receive this recognition.
American colonists had been drinking coffee for fifty years before the first coffee seed was planted in Brazil in 1727. A hundred years later, Brazil accounted for 30% of the world’s coffee supply. A hundred years after that, in the 1920s, Brazil held a virtual monopoly, producing 80% of the world’s coffee. Although Brazil’s market share peaked at 80% in the 1920s, its continuing status as the world’s largest coffee producer still gives the country considerable influence on the market and coffee prices. It is said that when Brazil sneezes, the coffee world catches a cold. In 1975, a “black frost†destroyed over 70 percent of the crop in Brazil, and coffee prices doubled worldwide. Brazil was a founding member of the Pan-American Coffee Bureau, which invented the concept of a “coffee break,†during an advertising campaign in the early 1950s.