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Blending Brazil with Indonesia - coffee specs

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Background of this coffee in the Netherlands

Brazil

Honestly, Brazil had never been on our minds as a potential origin for coffee importer This Side Up. We didn't think our mission of helping smallholders market their coffees would fit in such an established coffee industry. That was until Luiz Saldanha and his partners captured our imagination. They established Capricornio to breathe new life in five regions in the southern states of Paraná and São Paolo, which until the 1960s, were one of the country's most vibrant coffee producing regions. Due to terrible frosts and the rise of the major coffee regions up north, its production stagnated, leading many coffee farmers to move north, leaving their farms underdeveloped. Now, due to climate change, these regions have become attractive to farmers again, but hardly anyone saw specialty potential.

That is until Capricornio found 20 passionate farmers and started the Four Seasons project: they helped them turn their farms into modern, ecologically sustainable farms and process their coffees to the highest standards. Now, they have started to show what these coffee regions have to offer the specialty coffee world. Because of its uniquely low latitude (around the tropic of Capricorn at 23ºS), coffee here endures more stress while developing. This leads to large, slowly ripened cherries with surprisingly complex cup profiles, similar to what happens at higher altitudes. We were impressed not only by the coffee's cup quality, but by the company's achievements in processing and creating coffees in close cooperation with specialty roasters and experts (such as Aida Battle) worldwide.

This connection to the roaster's world meant there was an immediate click with This Side Up, and since 2017, we've been proud to promote Capricornio in the European market. For the second season, we're co-creating a diverse range of coffees together with roasters from around Europe: from signature blends to exclusive processing experiments and microlots.

Indonesia

This is certainly This Side Ups most controversial project to date. Having studied the successes of specialty robusta in India and Ecuador, we thought of the idea of upgrading the existing, low growing robusta on the island of Flores where our dear partner Nina van Toulon works to help coffee growers take better care of their natural habitats. Through Adri Yahdiyan, founder of Ontosoroh Coffee, we learned that not only does the island boast a range of unique robusta varieties, but that the quality of these "fine robustas" was already known worldwide. He then introduced us to ASNIKOM, a locally owned cooperative in the regency of Manggarai who could do something as radical as intuitive: process robusta with the same machinery and standards as arabica - and we vowed to pay them the same premium as they would get for fine arabicas. In 2017, the first results came in: a spicy, very full bodied robusta that is pleasantly bitter because of its caffeine content, sweet chocolaty and very clean.

Since 2018, our crop was sourced from three families within a single village of Rende Nao as opposed to multi sources (within Manggarai) last year. We also tweaked the pulped natural and did some semi-washed and fully washed experiments to highlight body and the crisp chocolaty overtones. For the unbiased roaster, this coffee could either be a wacky single origin or a beautiful supplement to blends that provide the flavour that traditional coffee drinkers sometimes miss so clearly (and vocally) in our specialty coffee niche...