personal coffee passport
Your coffee: Brazil Capricornio
FARMS: Fazenda Santa Mariana, Sitio Teixeira, Fazenda São Carlos
LOCATION: Marilia and Garça, Norte Pioneiro
CULTIVARS: Catuaí
EXPORTER: Capricornio Coffees
IMPORTER: This Side Up Coffees
ROASTER: Special Roast
About the farms
Capricornio coffees is located on the line of Capricorn (hence the name!) and therefore quite distant from the Equator, this means that winters are colder and average temperature is lower. The coffees will need to work harder to ripen, which increases the sweetness of the flavor, creating a very distinct coffee. This coffee is a blend especially prepared for Special Roast, and part of the Signature coffees line of the connected Capricornio Estates. Signature coffees have taste profiles idealized and chosen by Capricornio Coffees directors José Antônio and Luiz Roberto, and validated by the Quality Control team. The aim is to create taste profiles that are repeated every year, offering not only quality, but also consistency, that coffee drinkers recognize every year.
bacchi blend - coffee specs
what to taste for
Aroma: dark chocolate, dried berries.
Body: round mouthfeel, hazelnut, chocolate.
Acidity: gentle and rounded.
Aftertaste: black currant, bakers chocolate.
PROCESSING your coffee
The coffee is a pulped natural. The combination of altitude and processing results in a jammy, red fruit profile, with lots of sweetness and a dark chocolate backbone. The excellent treatment of the Signature lots give it unrivaled consistency in quality and flavor, year after year.
ROASTING YOUR COFFEE
Special Roast uses a 22kg Probat UG22 roaster, that has been built in 1965. The roast time is 10 minutes. After the first crack, the coffee is roasted for a remainder of 25% of the time.
Relative PRICE BREAKDOWN
64%
the price Capricornio pays its partner farmers for their parchment, expressed as price for green (milled) coffee. In general, for all Capricornio's coffees, they make sure that 85% of the coffee's FOB value is transferred back to their partner farmers.
11%
dry-milling costs and Capricornio's export fee.
2%
total shipping costs from Santos, through customs and to our warehouse. Full container loads good forwarding connections warrant such favourable shipping prices.
23%
Importing, financing, shipping bureaucracy, sampling and financing costs for This Side Up Coffees.
Background of this coffee in the Netherlands
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.