Augusto Borges / Brazil

For us, with our ongoing focus on vivid fruit flavors, naturally processed Brazilian coffee offers a slightly different kind of enjoyment from coffees grown elsewhere. Because it is grown at lower elevations than coffees from Africa and other South American countries, its acidity and flavor complexity tend to be more restrained, sometimes giving a flatter impression. At the same time, Brazil, the world's largest coffee-producing country, has considerable technical expertise built through many years of experience. Careful sorting and fermentation management produce gentle, clean, transparent fruit flavors. It may not be flashy, but its versatility—welcoming the drinker regardless of mood or time of day—is what draws us to this coffee.

A drive of around three to four hours along the main highways from São Paulo Airport brings you to Sao Goncalo do Sapucai, where Augusto lives. This small town lies in southern Minas Gerais, a state renowned as one of Brazil's principal coffee-producing regions.

Augusto is a fourth-generation producer who runs a coffee farm inherited from his family. He helped his parents grow coffee from an early age and inherited farmland from his father in 2008, when he was 17 or 18. His parents hoped he would become a lawyer or a doctor, but his love of life on the farm led him to choose coffee growing. Now in his early thirties, he has two children. His wife, Patricia, also comes from a coffee-producing family and continues to work in coffee production.

After inheriting the land from his parents, Augusto began thinking more deeply about coffee prices and sustainability and decided to transition to specialty coffee production. Changing cultivation methods used for three generations must have been a significant challenge. Even so, he committed himself to that decision. Augusto says that specialty coffee offers not only a system of fair pricing but also the power to connect people. He believes that the moment someone picks up a package bearing his name, his relationship with that person has already begun.

Augusto tells us that the joy of connecting with people around the world through coffee was something his father and grandfather did not experience in their time. For him, an important aspect of sustainability is ensuring that producers benefit from improvements in income and living infrastructure, alongside environmental progress. He takes his son, Otavio, along to his work activities, hoping to spark his interest in coffee. We often hear about younger generations moving away from coffee production in producing regions, and we look forward to seeing how this family's future unfolds.

Today, alongside improving quality, he is also working to improve growing conditions across all his farmland. He spoke to us with determination about the need to conserve the ecosystem so that he can eventually pass the farm on to his two children, just as his father passed it on to him. He also believes that fair incomes and a good standard of living for producers and workers are essential to encouraging the next generation to build a future in the coffee industry.

His land comprises 11 plots, referred to here as farms, where coffee is grown at different elevations and under varying conditions of shade and sunlight. Among these, we purchase coffee from farms at relatively high elevations. On small, well-ventilated hills, shade trees and cool breezes allow the coffee cherries to ripen slowly. The result is coffee with more delicate and vivid fruit flavors than coffee grown at lower elevations.

Mechanical harvesting is used on the open, low-lying farms, while sloping farms such as Capadocia and Otavio are harvested by hand because of the terrain and the need to maintain quality. Initially, we did not have a particularly positive impression of mechanical harvesting. But after visiting the extensive farmland—which is relatively small by Brazilian standards—we came to understand how difficult it would be to harvest everything by hand. Harvest times vary across the different plots, making it difficult to pick every crop at the ideal moment, and allocating labor efficiently is another challenge.