Increased moisture levels, (perhaps accompanied by an increase in daylight hours), stimulate the coffee tree to blossom. This blossoming is accompanied by pollination, and then the development of fruits. In Brazil, this usually occurs in September and October. The coffee reaches maturation and is ready to be picked 8-9 months after fertilization. The [...]
(Editor’s Note: I first met Dr. Shawn Steiman at the Association for Science and Information on Coffee (ASIC) conference last year in Campinas, Brazil (Click Here for Conference Link). A coffee scientist and consultant based in Hawaii, his The Hawai‘i Coffee Book: A Gourmet’s Guide from Kona to Kaua‘i is the first comprehensive overview of [...]
Etymology
The Mogiana coffee region, which runs along the São Paulo side of a stretch of the São Paulo/Minas border, is named after the Companhia Mogiana Estrada de Ferro train line that ran through this area.
Geography
As you can see by the map below, what distinguishes Mogiana from Sul de Minas is mainly the political border dividing [...]
A peaberry is the result of the coffee cherry producing a single coffee bean instead of the normal two. Under normal conditions, a coffee blossom has two ovules which after fertilization develop into two distinct coffee seeds, or beans, within the cherry. In the case of a peaberry, one of these two beans does [...]
“Beans, Beans, they’re good for your field,
The more you plant, the more you’ll yield.
The more you yield, the less you’ll owe,
So beans, beans, for every row.”
–Childish saying rerendered so you will remember that beans and other members of the Fabaceae family (legumes) are organic sources of nitrogen.
When I visited the farm of Carlos Sergio [...]
