A young region that won on consistency.
Cerrado is one of Brazil's relatively new coffee-growing regions, and it has risen quickly to a reputation for high-quality specialty coffee. What it offers a roaster above anything else is consistency — the ability to promise the same cup next year that we shipped this one.
The land stays balanced and fertile thanks to well-defined wet and dry seasons and abundant sunlight. Add advanced farming practice and the entrepreneurial streak of Cerrado's producers, and the region has become renowned. Most farms here are medium to large, running from a few hundred acres to genuine powerhouse estates.
Cerrado sits in the southwest of Minas Gerais, and the ground is unusually flat for coffee country — altitudes from 900 to 1,250 metres above sea level. That level land allows mechanical harvesting, which is simply out of reach for farms clinging to steep hillsides elsewhere in Brazil, and it is a large part of why the quality here holds so steady at volume.
Dried on the tree, not the bed.
It is always sunny in Cerrado, and producers built their processing around that fact rather than fighting it.
Where most origins pick ripe cherries and move them to raised beds, Cerrado lets the fruit dry while it is still on the tree.
That extra time on the branch concentrates sugar and flavour with minimal fermentation — intensity without the funk.
Flat ground lets producers harvest by machine, which keeps picking fast, uniform and affordable at scale.
The dried cherry is hulled, screened and density-sorted before the lot is released to roasters like us.
From smuggled seed to the world's largest producer.
Brazil's coffee trade began in 1727, when Arabica seeds were smuggled into the country. Within a century Brazil was the largest coffee producer on earth and coffee dominated its agricultural exports.
During the café com leite era of the 1880s — literally “coffee with milk” — São Paulo's coffee industry flourished alongside dairy production in Minas Gerais, and the agrarian oligarchs of both wielded enormous political power to push production and export further still. The infrastructure that era built is part of why Cerrado could scale so quickly a century later.
Brazil, on its own and in the blend.
We buy this lot for its sweetness and its spine. It anchors our Espresso and Cold Brew blends, and stands alone as a single origin for anyone who wants chocolate and brown sugar without a hint of sharpness.
