Sibaristica Coffee Roasters

Where coffee is priced, stored and shipped

Sul de Minas is the largest arabica-producing area in Brazil and in the world, accounting for close to a third of national production. But the reason the trip started here is Varginha rather than the fields: it is the single largest coffee-exporting municipality in the country, commercialising roughly 25 million bags a year against about 10 million bags of storage capacity. Louis Dreyfus, Volcafé, Mercon, Sucafina, Cofco, Olam and Stockler all operate from the same few streets. If you want to understand how a Brazilian differential is built and how a container is actually assembled and shipped, this is the room where it happens.

Where the coffee gets a producer's name on it

Northeast of São Paulo state, on the border with Minas. The plantings sit on hilly ground generally above 800 m, and the altitude combined with a mild climate, averaging 21 °C in summer and 17 °C in winter, slows ripening, which is what builds the sugars and aromatic compounds. The chain here organised itself: producers founded Alta Mogiana Specialty Coffee (AMSC) to guide quality and good practice on the farm and to protect the identity of the region's specialty coffees. This is the first stop on the route where you are dealing with a farm rather than a counterparty.

Where consistency is the product

Northwest Minas Gerais: 55 municipalities, around 4,500 rural properties and 3,500 producers across roughly 155,000 hectares planted to coffee. It was the first Brazilian coffee region recognised as an Indicação de Procedência, in 2005, and since 2013 it is the first and only Brazilian coffee region to hold a Denominação de Origem: a legal statement that its arabica has sensory characteristics that cannot be reproduced anywhere else. What makes that stick is the climate: two sharply defined seasons, hot wet summer and mild dry winter, 18–23 °C, about 1,600 mm of rain a year, and no frost occurrence. Uniform ripening is not luck here, it is structural.