This natural yellow bourbon hails from Baixadão in Brazil’s famed Mantiqueira de Minas region. It’s round, sweet and a little bit juicy, with a creamy mouthfeel, and notes of milk-chocolate, praline and apricot.
Mantiqueira de Minas sits on the Minas Gerais side of the Serra da Mantiqueira, a mountain range that runs along the borders of Minas Gerais, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro states. In 2020 it received Brazil’s first coffee-specific Denomination of Origin status in recognition of its unique terroir and the high quality of the coffee grown in the region. Unlike the common image of Brazilian coffee farms of vast, sprawling plains, and uniform rows of mechanically picked coffee, here there are beautiful rolling hills, and the coffee is hand-picked.
Baixadão is one of Mantiqueira’s most celebrated farms, and coffee from Baixadão frequently underpins our offering in the form of our house espresso Penny Rock. This lot though represents a higher scoring selection of natural yellow bourbon grown on the farm, displaying higher complexity and more prominent soft fruit notes, and showcasing the great potential of the yellow varieties grown in this unique corner of Brazil.
We first visited Baixadão in 2019, and the experience certainly left a mark. The immaculate rows of perfectly tended coffee trees merged seamlessly and sympathetically with the rolling landscape, testament to the level of care and attention, and the huge amount of work that owner Sebastião Afonso Da Silva has undertaken over the many years that he has overseen the farm.
All this is manifest in some truly stunning coffees, and culminated in Sebastião winning the 2015 Brazil Late Harvest Cup of Excellence competition with a 95.18 scoring natural catuaí - the highest score awarded in any Cup of Excellence competition to date.
When we revisited Baixadão in 2022, we learnt that they had recently stopped spraying the crop and applying chemical fertiliser to the soil. They had also started to plant cover crops between the rows of coffee trees with a view to improving soil health. The growing worm population is a great indicator that things are heading in the right direction, and Sebastião’s son Helisson took great delight in digging up the red soil and showing us some fine specimens!
Helisson is increasingly overseeing the work on the farm, and it was encouraging to see how knowledgable and passionate he is about it, leaving us with the feeling that Baixadão will be in good hands for the many years that we hope to continue this journey with them.
