Story
This is our third coffee from Brazil’s FAF (Fazenda Ambiental Fortaleza), but the first that is both single-farm and single-variety. The farm is Fazenda Pai Herói, helmed by Fernanda Moraes, and the variety is Arara—an Arabica hybrid rapidly gaining acclaim in Brazil over the past ten years or so. Fernanda’s farm has been in the family for three generations, cultivating coffee in earnest for two. Fernanda’s grandfather was a dairy farmer who technically began the family’s coffee journey with a few small parcels, but it was her father who truly revitalized the property and planted substantial amounts of coffee. When Fernanda and her siblings inherited the property from their father, Fernanda went on to acquire even more land, and today Fazenda Pai Herói has ~60 hectares of coffee production.
In the cup, we taste raspberry, cocoa, and cardamom. While this coffee’s dense sweetness is delightfully characteristic of our favourite selections from Brazil, its amplified fruit vibrancy is thanks to both the Arara variety as well as Fernanda’s meticulous farm and processing management. Arara is an Arabica hybrid principally derived from Obatã and Yellow Catuaí varieties, known in the field for its big and bright yellow fruit, its compact and easy-to-harvest stature, and perhaps most importantly—its hardiness and disease resistance. Thriving at high elevations, Arara is slow to ripen, cultivating complexity and rich fruit in the cup.
In addition to Arara, Fernanda has planted parcels of similarly quality-oriented Catucaí and Acauã Novo varieties alongside the farm’s longer-standing Catuaí and Mundo Novo trees. In order to ensure exceptional attention to detail, the vast majority of work in the field is done by hand—a labor intensive rarity for farms of this scale. This extra attention shines in the cup, and, for Fernanda, makes the work truly gratifying. As she says: “I really like being helped and being able to help these people in some way. Unlike a [typical] company, here the interaction with employees is direct and personal, we end up being part of each other's lives.”
Although not especially large by Brazil’s standards, Fernanda’s farm is certainly among the larger operations that we work with. With that in mind, we’re especially appreciative of our partnership with Fazenda Ambiental Fortaleza (“Environmental Fortress Farm”), guiding us toward equitable and sustainable partnerships at varying scales. FAF itself began as a farm, nearly 175 years ago, and transitioned to fully organic operations in the early 2000s under the direction of Sylvia and Marcos Croce. Since winning the Sustainability Award from the Specialty Coffee Association of America in 2008, FAF has turned their focus back to the community around them. They opened a coffee lab for experimenting with processing methods, a shared mill, and a direct trade exporting network. Today, FAF helps over 150 local specialty coffee growers scale the quality and sustainability of their harvest, and achieve financial prosperity via more equitable pricing.
