Bahia Field Trip 2011: The Movie
This year’s coffee hunter field trip headed to colourful Bahia in northern Brazil - a diverse and sometimes overlooked growing area, with some huge potential for distinctive specialty lots. We were lucky to take a talented cameraman with us, who made this film of the week - we hope it will help show what Mercanta and our field trips are all about..
Check out the film here and let us know what you think…
Also take a look at photos from the trip on our facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/Mercanta
Discovering Bahia..
Bahia, Brazil’s fifth largest state, boasts a vibrant Afro-Brazilian culture, 1000km of coastline, the dramatic Chapada Diamantina national park…and some truly outstanding coffees! Nevertheless, it is still a relatively unknown growing region for specialty buyers, sometimes overshadowed by the southeast’s coffee heartland, Minas Gerais.
We hope to change this and have been working with our partners at origin to offer various single-estate lots from producers in Bahia’s savannah highlands, with farms concentrated in two main regions: Planalto da Bahia in the south, and Cerrado da Bahia in the centre. Farms vary in size hugely - from family-run smallholdings up to vast estates with 1,000 hectares plus under coffee.
This year (crop 10/11) we were very excited by the distinctive cup profiles we found in our Bahian lots - very different from the coffees we are used to from Minas Gerais and Cerrado. We were particularly impressed by the complexity of the mouthfeel and the quality of the acidity - with some lots boasting a very bright, grape (tartaric) acidity.
The peak harvest in Bahia runs from June until September. Many of the Bahian coffees from smaller farms are described locally as ‘semi-washed’ - this is part way between fully washed and pulped natural, as the beans are left in the fermentation tank for around 12 hours after being processed (a shorter fermentation time than usual for a fully-washed coffee).
We can’t wait for our new crop Bahias to arrive - they’ll be landing in our UK and USA warehouses in December/January..
Comments
Post new comment