Mok – Filter B, Brazil 250g

Filter B stands for 100% Brazil, no blends, all credits to the producers. We work with the same producers every year and aim for the best possible quality only.

The Barbosa family has been cultivating coffee since the early 1900s when Elias Barbosa bought the Fazenda in Campos Altos, a small town in Cerrado. Today it is run by his great-grandson Danilo Barbosa and family. Since the first generations worked on the farm, a lot has changed.

For one, the demand of coffee from Brazil worldwide has risen – and still rises every day, while supply can’t follow because production suffers from unpredictable climatological events such as frosts or long droughts. A small frost kills a harvest, a severe frost kills all the trees. This uncertainty creates exponential price fluctuations such as the huge raise we are experiencing today.

Another change is that more and more producers grow specialty coffee in Brazil. Producers who were originally only interested in commodity, or at least whose ancestors were, have switched to specialty. This is greatly due to the measures the Brazilian government has taken to abolish slavery and to imply higher and fairer minimum wages. So where the coffee industry in Brazil used to run on manual labour, these socio-economical measures have rapidly pushed technical innovation forward. Mechanical harvesting is now the norm and its (economical) efficiency makes specialty coffee growing an accessible practice.

Cherries on Fazenda D’Barbosa are picked through mechanical rakes that sense ripe cherries and wriggle them loose through vibration, dropping them into tarps that are spanned between the plants. They’re then collected by people and brought to the on-site processing station where they’re laid out to dry in parabolic dryers.

For our Filter B series, we will release 2 microlots from Fazenda D’Barbosa. This Red Catuai is the first one and it’s full of delicious, juicy red fruit and chocolate flavours.