A Coffee for Every Moment

Melitta Brazil (tagline - "a coffee for every moment") has a facility here in Avare which we were able to visit today with our Rotarian hosts.  We tracked coffee production from start to finish beginning in a relatively small field of coffee plants and ending an enormous (enormous) roasting and packaging facility.  In between we visited a family farm where they process coffee as they've done for decades.

Beans on the plant.  Both ripe and green beans are havested, depending on the taste desired.  All of Melitta's coffee is harvested by machines now.  Two large forks grab the branches and shake.

One of Melitta's tasters (forefront) lead our group and a host Rotarian (blue shirt) was kind enough to translate into English for us.  As an aside, all of us (to various degrees) understand the idea of a straight-forward few sentences in Portuguese but a translation delivers important details.

 

Banana trees are planted as windbreaks.  They don't compete with the coffee.  The bananas are harvested for commercial use.

 

It doesn't hurt to pray.  A pretty little chapel on the farm.

 

 

Coffee beans are piled on a "parking lot" and raked daily for a week to promote drying.  At night it's piled up again and covered with a tarp to keep it dry.

 

 

A raked Day-One pile

 

 

Inside the barn where the farm's processing equipment is kept.  It's old, wooden and wonderful--and still in use.

 

From the farm we traveled to Melitta's facility where truckloads and truckloads of coffee are roasted, packed and shipped. About 20 percent of Brazil's coffee is exported to the US--another 20 percent to Europe.  Europe gets the smoother flavors--we get (because evidently we like it) the more acidic. 

 

Lunch afterwards included coffee...a generous gift of coffee.  Thanks Avare Rotary and Melitta Brazil.