Day 3, São Paulo: Interview 1# with Fazenda Ambiental Fortaleza

This afternoon I am heading to the Fazenda Ambiental Fortaleza Studio in the city of São Paulo, where I’ll interview Felipe Croce. Just a quick overview of FAF: it’s an organic Arabica coffee farm in the state that’s known as Brazil’s financial capital. Felipe is the son of the founders, Silvia and Marcos. From what I read on their website, he worked in a U.S. specialty coffee roasters until about 6 years ago, when he moved back to São Paulo to join his family business.

Fazenda Ambiental Fortaleza: advocating sustainable organic and non-organic coffee farming (img from http://www.fafbrazil.com)

I first heard about FAF first from a quick google of coffee farms in Brazil. At first, since I’m focusing mainly on robusta coffee (Conilon/Coffea canephora), this specialty coffee collective didn’t seem to fit the project criterion… but then the thought to contact them became real when I made a connection with Singaporean specialty coffee roaster and café, Nylon coffee.

Nylon’s cupping sesh (img from nyloncoffee.sg)

Nylon’s motto is this: “Inspired by the stories of each coffee, we travel far and wide to coffee producing countries to find the best coffees possible.” Jia Min from Nylon coffee told me in an email that they’ve been buying various arabicas directly from FAF partner farms for 3 years now, and made their first trip to Brazil in 2014. In fact, Fazenda Ambiental Fortaleza was the very first farm Nylon bought arabica from directly since the Singaporean roasters began in 2012. Pretty cool, huh.

So I sent Felipe an email a month ago. In a couple of hours, I’ll hop on a bus to their FAF Studio on the corner of Praça Horácio Sabino this afternoon, to meet him for a presentation about their sustainable agriculture ethos. It’ll be interesting to learn about the specialty coffee strategy and even ask Felipe’s thoughts on robusta – since you can’t learn about either coffee in isolation. Exciting stuff!

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To new readers: I’m Ruici, a fourth year undergraduate of Environmental Science and Policy (A.B.) at Duke University. I’m from the island-city of Singapore! The main focus of my project is on the capacity of small-scale robusta coffee farmers to adapt to local changes in climate. It’s a project about sustainable agriculture that faces climate change head on, from the ground up. I’m learning about the most valuable tropical agricultural commodity in the world’s largest caffeinators, Brazil and Vietnam, thanks to a collection of grants from my university. Not just any coffee, though! Robusta coffee, the underdog sibling of the doubly priced arabica. In other words, it’s a project about chasing the roots of what we eat and drink in a world of a inevitably changing climate.

Pictures are not mine unless stated so.

Coffee Diaspora

The coffees emerged from the African continent – Ethiopia and Republic of Congo (then a Belgian colony) – way back, borne on the waves of trade and commerce, and of course an addiction for the magic brew which gave clarity of thought. The ‘original’ arabica coffee, as one may call it, emerged from Ethiopia during what some think was the 6th century, and went to Yemen to be cultivated for export and to a lesser extent, local consumption. In the 1500-1600s coffee was exported up from Yemen to Turkey, from where coffee fever took hold of Western and Northern Europe (the average Fin consumes 12kg of coffee per year; the most coffee per capita in the world). From there, coffee was brought to the United States; at the same time, it is thought that arabica was smuggled to India.

A route through which Latin America received arabica was through the Caribbean. Seeds had been brought to Martinique, an island in the Lesser Antilles volcanic island chain, from Paris by French colonizers, where it was cultivated using slave labor in the 1700s. From Martinique, Coffea arabica was brought to the Dominican Republic, Haiti, México, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guyana and today’s coffee giants of the Americas, Brazil and Colombia. Brazil also received the bourbon variety of arabica from the French, which brought it from plantations in Reunión – also maintained with indentured and slave labor up to the abolishment.

The route that robusta (C. canephora) took from its native Republic of Congo in the late 1800s and 1900s is a little less well known. This may be because robusta coffee is much less valued on the higher-value specialty coffee market for its bitter, astringent taste; instead it is used in instant coffees which cater to an entirely different market. Many coffee retailers advertise that their beans are 100% arabica for that added sense of luxury and promise of a better taste. Although that is not to say that robusta doesn’t sell outside of instant coffee – it is added to arabica in certain coffee brands for that oomph, that extra kick of caffeine and the presentation of the espresso shot.