Exploring Brazilian Coffee at Daterra Coffee Farm - European Coffee Trip | Coffee Camping

Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. Here's captain speaking. A couple of weeks ago, DR Wakefield sent us a message. We are traveling to Brazil and we've got a spot for you as our media partners. Would you like to join us? So I said yes, that would be great. I've never been to Brazil and I don't really know anything about Brazilian coffee. And so at the end of July 2017, I took my camera and got on a plane to Sao Paulo to cover the whole visit to Datura Coffee Farm. So it's a.m. in the morning and we arrived to Uberlândia airport. We're taking Wen to the coffee farm. So here we are. Let's start by telling you about our guides. DR Wakefield is the UK representative for Datura. And we work really closely with our roasters in the UK and parts of Europe to connect them to Datura here in Brazil so that we find the right coffee for the right roasters. Every year during the harvest season, we host a lot of people from all over the world here in the farm. So this week, for example, we are hosting people from the UK. So on this trip specifically, we brought some clients from Europe who in turn have brought some of their clients. We're going to spend three days here to learn all you need to know about coffee production. Terra is a family-owned business. It started 33 years ago. When we started, we started with some fruits, pine trees, cattle. And finally, when we found coffee, we challenged ourselves to do coffee beans that go beyond the norm and not always taste what people think of when they think of Brazilian coffee. Datura were always pioneers of the coffee industry, especially here in Brazil. So they were one of the first estates in this region to grow coffee. They were voted last year the most sustainable farm in Brazil, not just in coffee, but in any agricultural product. So it is officially the most sustainable farm in this country. Datura has 6,200 hectares of land. It sounds pretty big, and it's quite big, but more than half of it is actually environmental preservation lands, areas that you will not touch. 2,800 is actually coffee planted areas. But what we do to keep the quality in this big farm, we slice the whole farm into mini-farms. So each mini-farm has from 5 to 15 hectares, and we have all information about it. And every decision that is done for one mini-farm is done individually. Morning from Datura Coffee Farm. We're taking the van and going to the field? Yeah, right. That's right. Let's go. Some of the farms have their cherries hand-picked. And these are pretty much just about to be harvested. And some other farms use big machines to harvest their coffee. The machines that we have here in the farm, they are projected not to harm the coffee trees. They build them pretty almost entirely from scratch. Their mechanics work on them to deliver the best quality. Doing that helps pick only the cherries that are really ready. Green cherries stay in the tree to pick them. So that's the idea, not shaking too much to pick those green cherries. They need to stay here. So we come back and do a second or a third picking with the harvesting machines if we need to. So we gotta go. So that was harvesting the coffee with a big machine. And we continue. After seeing the harvesting, we are now headed to the coffee nursery where the tiny trees are cultivated. Here they grow little seedlings into big trees to plant them around the farm. There is 1.8 million seedlings in this little area, all being planted by hand. I'm guessing it's this. It's a Bourbon Amarillo, which I imagine is a yellow Bourbon. So once it's planted in the field, it will take anywhere between two to three years to produce coffee. And after that point, it will have grown to be about this sort of height before it then goes up to being like three meters or two meters tall. We visited some experimental fields on the farm where they cooperate with universities and scientists in order to challenge the land and learn more about the production. This is an experimental field where we are planting Laurina varietal, which is a naturally low-caffeine varietal from the Rio Island. And also some Geisha trees, which is not common at all in Brazil. We got the Geisha seeds from a university in Brazil that they have a big genetics bank called Epamig. And we are testing those two varietals with shade ground techniques. Here we have the first cherries of these Geisha trees from this experimental field. Of course, that's very little amount of cherries because these trees are only one and a half years old. So Brazil has a little bit of an image problem. It's the world's largest producer of coffee. So even today, it still produces like a third of all the coffee in the world. And a lot of people in the world have just known it to be the commercial origin. But recently, over the last 10, 20 years, a lot of effort and energy has gone in to a number of farms and terroirs leading the way. But there are others in the country as well who are putting a lot more focus on quality rather than quantity. Of all Datura coffees, the Datura Classics make up 75% of the whole production. These are coffees with the classic Brazilian characteristics. Notes of nuts, chocolate and some sweetness, consistently scoring between 80 to 86 points. Datura Collection coffees make up 25% of the production. These are coffees that score 86 to 89, are fully traceable and usually used as single origins. The experimental 1% are called masterpieces by Datura. We have this experimental unit here in the farm that we call the masterpieces unit. We have all the possibilities, different kinds of poppers that use lots of water, no water, little water, all the kinds of drying techniques from raised beds with shade, with raised beds, full sun, patio, drum dryers with gas adjustment for temperature. So the idea is having all these techniques and these possibilities to combine them and try to create new flavors. And we have been very successful in some of our micro lots, creating these very different flavors that most of the times people cup and say, OK, this is not what I expect from Brazil. We are at Datura's experimental processing facility. So this is where all their micro lots and their crazy experiments that they produce every year get processed. We were thrilled to cup the potential masterpieces. Those coffees were some of the best ones we have ever tasted, completely different from the usual Brazilian coffees. Any general comments? We did a real hard job. So we just finished the cupping from the project masterpieces and it was mind-blowing. Really the best cupping I've ever had. The people in the farm, everyone's so passionate about it. And then when we were able to present a table like that, and I feel like we are giving baby steps in changing how the world perceives Brazil. And for us as coffee geeks and as Datura employees, it's just mind-blowing. Everyone gets to participate in this process. Of course. And we want everyone's roots to be forever in the farm for the future generations. To say our last goodbye, we planted a tree that will grow on the farm with our name. So we planted the tree. Now we are moving again. And there will be a second surprise, which we have no idea. Let's go. Okay, guys, this is our last tree. Before leaving the farm, we gathered around a dinner table to share the last cup of coffee together. The whole trip was mind-blowing. We learned so much about the coffee culture in Brazil, the farming processes at Datura, and its investment in innovations. We have to say thank you for coming and spending time with us. So pretty much we watched the sunset in this magic place, enjoying some coffee, and we toast for this moment. Likewise, thank you for taking all your time to look after us so well. It's been fantastic. Guys, it's been amazing. And as Will said, there are yet many prejudices to what the quality of Brazilian coffees can be. To everyone who has doubts about Brazilian coffee, I'd like to say that you haven't tried the coffees from this farm. Thank you, Datura, for this incredible experience.