About The Coffee Farm
This Farm has been part of Carmo Coffees since 2014. Carmo Coffees is a purchasing and processing centre located in the city of Helidora at the site of Fazenda Floresta. This processing plant allows the local smaller producers to deliver their cherry to the mill where Carmo can help apply their expertise in processing as well as use their New Flavours program to create diverse and interesting cup profiles. This allows the farmer to receive greater prices for their coffees to then invest back in their farms and families for the future. Carmo help support the quality aspect of the coffee by providing help through the use of agronomist engineers and technicians to help the farmers produce a higher quality cherry. This also reduces the farmers risk with the processing being centralised which would limit outside factors that could spoil the coffee and their yearly incomes.
At the Farm there is a wet mill, 2 double pulping stations as well as 9 mechanical driers.
In 2015 Carmo worked with 1000 partner farmers, and the plant has the potential to or with up to 4000 producers in the future. Carmo also take extra care of the environment making sure they are good stewards of the land they use from Fazenda Floresta as well as promoting good practices across farmers they work with. Right now 40% of the land is designated for Permanent Environmental Preservation.
This coffee comes from the 90Ha Fazenda Pariso farm situated at high altitudes of 1300 -1500 masl in Brazil. The owner is the 81 year old Antonio Fortes who first bought the land to grow a mix of crops including coffee and is still at the helm today. After a couple of years and realising that coffee was a more cost effective crop he started to plant more coffee seedlings. Unfortunately this coincided with one of the worst frosts which decimated the coffee but he fought back and began all over again. He also discovered that coffee grew better when planted with banana trees. Antonio has been working with Carmo Coffees since 2008 and realised the quality of his coffee by entering their competitions and this has inspired him to continue with the production of specialty coffee and use the varietals Mundo Novo, Yellow Bourbon, Yellow Catuai and Acaia. In the harvest, coffee was manually picked in the first week of August before then being taken to the Presente Do Sol Mill where it is it floated and separated. From here is then dried on patio for 3-4 days before then being transferred to mechanical driers where it is dried slowly and consistently for 3 days at 45 degrees (giving an internal drier temperature of 35 degrees). The coffee is then left to rest in vats for 30 days before being milled for transport.
