Coffee: Brazil

Brazil was and is the largest coffee producer in the world! Just think that it occupied more than 80% of the world market, and it has done so for hundreds of years.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century coffee arrived thanks to French Guiana, while Brazil was under the Portuguese "colonization".

Surely one of the "darker" sides of this period, up to the mid-nineteenth century, was the use of over a million slaves for the cultivation of coffee ... not that today in many other parts of the world it is very different!

When the British stopped the slavery trade between Africa and Brazil in 1850, the latter brought in migrant workers from other countries or employed internal trafficking.

Only in 1888 there was the abolition of slavery in Brazil, and then there was a fear of a decline in coffee production ... but it was not so!

There was a second boom, from 1880 to 1930, where Brazil produced over 80% of world coffee production, but the great crisis of the 1930s unfortunately led Brazil to burn millions of bags of coffee ...

The Second World War and Nazism led to an enormous imbalance in the prices of coffee on the market at the time, which were then stabilized and regulated, since 1962, thanks to the ICA (international agreement on coffee), which then lapsed towards the end of the years' 90 because Brazil did not agree to lower its quotas, and hence a drastic fall in coffee prices.

It is undeniable that the great variation in harvests or the loss of a large part of them due, for example, to frosts, led to considerable market fluctuations from one year to the next, due precisely to the impact that Brazilian coffee has on a global level!

Let's now talk, in detail, of the Brazilian plantations and their vastness, where it is easy to use different types of production, which, together with the multiple climatic variations, lead to a fairly widespread variation of the grain.

In Brazil, both Arabica and Robusta are grown, obviously based on the height of the crops that will identify one or the other species.

The approach to the production of coffee, it must be said, in Brazil is rather aggressive, that is, "consumed" up to the limit of a land, it immediately passes to another with "fresh" land!

Fortunately, over time, natural processes have helped to increase the quality of Brazilian coffee, and today it is highly appreciated for its sweetness, its medium body with a clear, clean finish and without too much acidity!

A little mention on the Robusta:

• it is among the largest producers of Robusta in the world;
• usually called "conillion", it is produced in regions such as Rondonia.

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