Brazilian Sítio Maranhão, one of my favourite coffees of all time.
You can brew this as a juicy espresso or filter, tasting more like it comes from Tanzania than Caldas in some brews.
This can also be brewed as a chocolatey brew.
Farm: Brazilian Sítio Maranhão
Farmer/family: Jose & Claiton Delgado,
Region: Caldas, Minas Gerais, South Minas
Process: Pulped Natural
Varietals: Red Catucai and Yellow Catucai
Roast: One Roast
Altitude: 1100-1200 Meters above sea level.
Sitio Maranhao is a small farm, not far from the entrance to Pocos de Caldas, in Minas Gerais. The move to speciality coffee has beenongoing over recent years and is painstaking work. The coffee harvest is only part of the year’s work. As soon as the harvest is complete, there is a whole host of other things to attend to, but at least the workload reduces a little. Between Claiton and Jose, they are ingenious and very resourceful, making systems where they reuse motors for different parts of the coffee processing.
All of the pickings are selective, meaning that every bean that you buy has been picked by a member of the Delgado family when it is ripe. There can be 4 or 5 passes (pickings) across the harvest, none of the automated machine scale here. On top of this, I doubt a harvester could even make it up the steep, steep slopes.
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In a cupping Bowl:
Aromatics: Chocolate and a promise of Fruit
Body: Light to medium
Acidity: White Currants, white grape|
Aromatically, you just know this is going to be chocolatey. From the off, this old favourite is chocolate-forward. Dark chocolate and cocoa dominate, with a soft, sweet white currant acidity, adding another dimension. The subtle, sweet fruit builds and becomes a lot more interesting than where we started. On cooling, the coffee is like white grape and dark chocolate.
In Filter Brewing, I recommend 55g of coffee per litre as a great place to start. If you use more coffee, it is going to be all chocolatey, and for me, I like to explore what else this coffee can be. If you are lucky enough to be able to adjust your filter brewing temperature, be it a machine or even a kettle, I recommend playing around with it. Let’s try a little cooler than your standard brew, 94 or 93 °C, for your filter brewer and possibly 95 °C on your pouring kettle. Many of us (me included) found a V60 recipe that worked, and we stuck to it, and the only change was the coffee.
In espresso: because this is a light roast, I have been brewing with a bigger dose for milk-based drinks. I think this may be turning into a phase, as In am still enjoying this with a little less coffee in my espresso recipe. If your machine can and you are really into milk-based drinks, then I would increase the brew temperature to 95- 96 °C.
9oz milk-based drink: Milk chocolate, cocoa (18g of coffee into 35-ish grams in about 30 seconds. Yes! Don’t worry too much about exact seconds.
6oz Milk-based drink: This was so much more balanced than the 9oz. Not stronger, but solid, cosie chocolate.
Espresso: We tried this with 18g (and found that rather than reinventing the coffee wheel) it was predictively heavy. When you are brewing 18g of coffee and extracting it in 30 seconds, then adding more liquid can take it to quite a long one. By reducing the dose by a gram and not adjusting the grind, the brew is bright and juicy and tastes more like the Ngoro Crater than Caldas.
