Santa Barbara
Maple syrup and honey sweetness, with notes of orange, cranberry, and peach. Silky texture, with a clean, balanced finish.
Santa Barbara is a 12-hectare farm owned by Eulino José de Novais. It is located in the small town of Piatã in Bahia’s Chapada Diamantina region, at an altitude of 1,350 metres above sea level. Chapada Diamantina translates to ”Diamond Plateau” in Portuguese, and for 100 years this area was mined for the gemstones embedded in its cliffs. Today the region is famous for its specialty coffee.
Piatã is a very unique and privileged coffee-growing area in the Chapada Diamantina region, with high altitudes and temperatures that vary from 2°C to 18°C in the winter. These factors, combined with the area’s rich soil and growing conditions, present favourable conditions for producing high-quality coffee and results in a very distinctive cup profile that is unique to this part of Brazil and unlike any other producing regions in the country. Generally, we find coffees from this region to be complex and elegant, with a bright and defined acidity, transparent cup profile, with delicate florals citrus and even stone fruit and berries.
Surprisingly, the Piatã growing region has only recently started to become recognised internationally for its high quality.
Piatã rose to fame after the 2009 Cup of Excellence, where five of the top 10 spots came from this tiny growing region. The region’s dominance in the awards has continued every year since and incredibly, in the 2016 Cup of Excellence Pulped Natural competition, an astounding 19 of the 24 winning lots came from Piatã!
Piata coffees are now considered some of the best in Brazil. These coffees are extremely limited, and production is relatively small, given the small scale of the farms in this part of Brazil. This particular lot that we have purchased from Santa Barbara is 600kg in size.
Eulino José de Novais looks after Santa Barbara with his entire family, including his son, Reginaldo. The family shares the workload and all have specific areas of responsibility – from maintaining the soil, to overseeing harvest and ensuring the coffee is picked when perfectly ripe, through to ensuring quality is preserved through careful processing, milling and drying. Together they exert great care to produce the best quality coffee possible, and this has been recognised by many accolades that the farm has won for its quality – both in Bahia’s state-sponsored Coffee Quality Competition, as well as the Cup of Excellence (most recently in 2016, where the farm placed 23rd).
The Novais family has planted both Catuaí and Catucaí variety trees on their farm, and over time, removed any trees that were not producing the right quality or quantity and now the plantation has been optimised to produce the best possible quality coffee as well as yield.
HOW THIS COFFEE WAS PROCESSED
Picking is done selectively and is mainly conducted by women (called ”panhadeiras de cafe”), who are extremely disciplined and ensure only the very best cherries are selected. After pulping the cherries are allowed to ferment for 12 hours, before being sun-dried on meticulously clean patios with their mucilage still attached—spread in thin layers and raked several times a day. These patios are covered with a greenhouse-like structure to ensure the coffee does not get wet or dry too quickly. Finally, the beans are separated into numbered lots which are stored and rested in parchment in a purpose-built warehouse and then cupped for quality control prior to export.
