Brazil, Blend Bairro

About the Coffee

This blend is built from lots produced by smallholder farms surrounding São Bartolomeu, a small town in Brazil's Mantiqueira de Minas region. Mantiqueira sits at higher elevations than most of Brazil's coffee-growing areas, which slows the cherry's development and gives the beans more density. Each farm dries its own cherries on patios using the natural process, meaning the fruit dries around the seed before it's removed. This adds body and sweetness to the final cup.

Because the lots come from multiple small farms rather than one large estate, Bright Jenny blends them to build consistency across harvests. Natural processing in Brazil is common, but Mantiqueira's elevation separates these farms from the lower-grown Brazilian coffees that tend to produce flatter, heavier results. The patio drying happens at each individual farm, giving producers direct control over how the coffee develops during that stage.

Bright Jenny roasted this darker than their other single origins, but used a shorter development ratio than their darkest roast to preserve more of what the coffee brings on its own. Development ratio refers to the time the bean spends after it "cracks" during roasting, and a shorter ratio means less of that natural character gets roasted out. The result is a dark roast with more going on underneath the surface than most people expect from Brazilian coffee.

About Bright Jenny

Bright Jenny is a Vancouver-based coffee roaster. The roaster page wasn't accessible at the time of writing, so we weren't able to pull their full founding story. What we can say from their coffees is that they pay close attention to roast profiling and are willing to take a different approach depending on what a coffee needs, which is apparent in how they've handled this Brazil.

We'll update this section when we have more to share. In the meantime, the coffee speaks for itself.

"Bright Jenny is another roaster we love for how seriously they take their craft without taking themselves too seriously. The result: a panel of excellently roasted and delicious coffees that fit a broad set of tastes. The owner (Dave Upshaw) himself considers their dark roast, Smoke & Mirrors, among his favourites, to which Dave says: "yes, coffee nerds are allowed to like dark roasts.""

- Dean, Director of Coffee