Brazil Offers Up a Better Cup of Coffee

As the Andrews Sisters used to boogie in 1940s Hollywood: “There’s an awful lot of coffee in Brazil.”

But how good does it taste?

The chances are your morning cup of coffee contains Brazilian beans, but they may be there as cheap ballast to fill out a blend rather than to tickle your taste buds.

Long the world’s top coffee producer, Brazil has for decades preferred to concentrate on high volume and a big market share rather than the quality of its brew.

But things are changing.

Stung by the crash in world coffee prices since an international price-support pact broke up in July, 1989, a select group of Brazilian producers are attempting a return to traditional growing and harvesting to produce extra high quality beans for gourmets abroad.

“Our ideas have changed,” said Marcelo Vieira, president of the newly formed Specialty Coffee Assn. of Brazil.

“Up until a few years ago, the emphasis was on maximizing productivity and volume. Now, if you don’t look after quality, you are lost.”

At a recent meeting of association members in the farming town of Vargem Grande do Sul in Sao Paulo state, growers eagerly swapped notes on how to pamper their plantations to produce prized gourmet beans.

“We need to recover some traditions which were lost decades ago,” said Washington Luiz Alves Rodrigues, general manager of Ipanema Agro-Industria, Brazil’s biggest coffee farm and a member of the association.

“We are now starting to use donkeys instead of tractors on our plantations so as not to squash the ripe coffee cherries on the ground,” he said.

The association’s main aim is to develop markets for the gourmet coffee and win over skeptical buyers who doubt that Brazil can match the quality of its Colombian, Costa Rican and Jamaican rivals.

The market may be small--the association would be happy to sell 30,000 of its 130-pound bags this harvest, while Brazil as a whole exported 21.1 million bags last year--but it is highly lucrative.

Agribahia SA, a Portuguese-owned grower in Bahia state, received an offer for its gourmet beans of 84 cents a pound--nearly twice the going rate for Brazilian coffee.

To exploit the market fully, however, the association needs to overcome a marketing and image problem.

“I went to the United States to answer the question, ‘Why don’t gourmet coffee shops in the United States and Europe stock Brazilian beans,’ ” said Carlos Henrique Jorge Brando, a director of the coffee machinery firm Pinhalense SA.

“The reply was: ‘You guys don’t promote yourselves.’ ”

To get around that, the association has produced a smart brochure showing lovingly tended old colonial coffee ranches and yellow-tinted images of coffee sacks awaiting shipment.

Quality control is carried out by the only broker member of the association, Wolthers Associates, whose experienced tasters check samples offered by the member growers to check that they are up to gourmet standards.

Gourmet drinkers may be surprised to learn that the way farmers treat the coffee after they pick it is at least as important as how they grow the beans, the association says.

“Most coffees are very good when they come off the tree,” Vieira explained. “Growers then have a choice. They can either keep that quality or ruin it.”

All too often, the delicate red coffee cherries are picked unripe, squashed under tractor wheels or left on the ground to ferment into harsh-tasting dross unfit for export.

Association members spend up to twice the normal amount on harvesting their beans to ensure that unfit beans do not make it into their gourmet sacks.

Vieira says the results speak for themselves.

“We have done extensive tasting tests comparing our best coffees with the competition from around the world,” he said. “Our washed coffees are as good or better than the South American competition.”