We have been buying coffee from this unusual farm for many years now. Brazil is the world’s largest coffee producing country and a lot of this coffee is conventional. This is how we describe coffees which are commercially grown for bulk export. They themselves have varying grades and qualities but are fairly standardised in flavour, and not necessarily from one farm.

Daterra lies in Brazil's Cerrado region which accounts for almost 23% of the country. They became the first business of any kind to achieve Rainforest Alliance certification. Over 60% of the land they own is a nature reserve with a rich variety of wildlife. Birds, wolves, squirrel monkeys and burrowing owls are just a few examples.

The concept was founded in the 1980s with the aim of producing high quality coffee, protecting the environment, and promoting social development. Luis Pascoal was the leading figure in the development of the project which took 10 years of recovery of the land before they began producing any coffee.

The coffee farm itself is segmented into 216 small plots each individually managed which are between 5 and 15 hectares in size. They work on a terroir system, identifying how much water or fertiliser each may need. All these small lots start to show their ripe cherries in May. Because the land is set on a plain, they can mechanically harvest the coffee, however they do not buy any old machines but design and build their own. 

Their machines operate in a much gentler way than standard machines, not damaging the trees and only separating the ripe cherries from the branches. Even then they are extremely careful about when the coffee should be picked. They will pick samples from each plot, process them and then taste them before committing to a complete harvest ensuring that they have matured properly. 

That isn’t even the last step though, for the cherries will have some variation in maturation between them despite these precautions. In order to deal with this, they created a smart coffee processing unit which can separate the cherries into eight maturation levels. From this process they can prepare coffees for export by combing the flavours from these cherries to produce various flavours. 

This is how they produce Daterra Bruzzi, by taking cherries from different plots, and with different maturation levels to make a typical chocolate cherry rich bodied coffee. With careful roasting these flavours are revealed and make a wonderful espresso coffee. If you visit us in Duke Street you can try it for yourselves as it is our house espresso.

We are really pleased to be selling Daterra coffees, they are an innovative farm who will experiment with processing small lots and they share all the information they find freely with other coffee farm around the world.