History of Rio coffee

By the late 1830s coffee had surpassed sugar as Brazil’s most important export crop. Production was centered on large plantations using slave labor in the valley of the Paraiba River, west of the city of Rio de Janeiro. Later it was expanding onto southern Minas Gerais and western Sao Paulo.

The Brazilian, commonly called Rio coffee, it berry is of medium size, greenish color and appears rusted with specks of gray. It is not a fine flavored coffee, having a good deal of acridness, but it is in favor with farmers generally because “it goes farther than mild coffee.”

Normally Rio coffees improved with age, as they are naturally strong and earthy. Age might be expected to soften and to mellow them. It should be roasted very evenly, of a light brown color, and used very soon afterward as it loses value every day after it is roasted and after it is ground oit will become almost worthless by a few days’ exposure to the air.

After 1850 Brazil led the world in coffee production. The coffee plantation of the mid-nineteenth century was the political economic and social core of Brazil.
History of Rio coffee

Coffee from Brazil

Latin America countries dominated coffee production and exports, with Brazil as the main actor. It is the leading coffee producer worldwide, also is the second largest consumer after the United States.

Brazil is the largest Arabica producer in the world, and its coffee plantations are composed of 73% Arabica and 27% Robusta trees.

Brazil is experiencing a yearly increase of 5% in coffee consumption and will soon have am internal consumption rate of twenty-one million bags yearly, closed to the twenty-five million consumed in the USA.

Brazil has long been the world’s largest producer, but production has recently been boosted by changes in how and where coffee is grown.

Coffee was introduced into south-eastern Brazil around 1774, and at first became established in cleared lands previously planted in sugarcane.

Throughout the 1880s and into the early twentieth century, Brazil produced more than half of the world’s coffee.

Coffee is grown on some 2.5 million ha between latitudes 10 and 24 degree S, mostly on gently sloping land, often with high tech cultivation practices.

This country ranks first in coffee production, with a yield of around 44 million 60 kg-bags in 2006, this represent 30% of the world’s coffee production.

Most of Brazil’s coffee was exported to Europe, especially Germany, the Low Countries and Scandinavia, and to the United States, the largest single market.

There is some Brazilian coffee in almost every cup of espresso and in most canned coffee and major roaster’s blends. Coffee from Brazil has delighted the world for many years, bringing with it the contagious joy of its people, their colorfulness, their taste and their smells.
Coffee from Brazil