Ethica Filter

About the Coffee

Cachoeira is a family farm in Carmo do Paranaíba, in Brazil's Cerrado Mineiro region, run by the Barbosa family across four generations. Danilo Barbosa's great-grandfather Elias first started growing coffee, passing the operation down through Claudio Barbosa de Paula and then Jairo Barbosa de Paula. Today Danilo runs the farm alongside his sons Vítor Marcelo and Sergio Ricardo, with a team of ten people total, including his wife and daughter-in-law. The farm sits at 1,100 meters in Cerrado Mineiro, a region with sharply defined dry and wet seasons that concentrate sugars and slow fruit development on the tree.

Red Catuai is the variety grown here, a hybrid developed in Brazil in the 1940s known for its productivity and resilience. Cachoeira uses natural processing, meaning the whole coffee cherry is dried intact around the seed. This lets the fruit dry slowly and impart its sugars directly into the bean over several weeks. The Barbosa family runs a quality control team that tracks every step of production from individual trees through to the warehouse, keeping a close record of what happens at each stage.

Cerrado Mineiro's dry season plays a direct role in the quality of the harvest. Low humidity and cooler temperatures during drying reduce the risk of fermentation defects and help the coffee dry evenly. The region's flat topography also makes selective harvesting and sorting more consistent than in steeper growing areas.

About Ethica Coffee Roasters

Ethica Coffee Roasters was founded in Toronto, taking its name from the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza's work Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata, a text about aligning actions with reason and ethics. That framing carries through to how they source: the team focuses on traceable green coffee with documented farmer relationships, treating the story behind each lot as part of what they're offering.

Their sourcing approach prioritizes hand-selected specialty green coffee, and they share producer information alongside each offering rather than keeping the supply chain anonymous. The Ethica Filter is their house filter roast, designed to be approachable and consistent for everyday home brewing.

"There is an Ethica coffee that stands out in my mind - a Washed Castillo from Wilton Benitez that had rosemary as a tasting note. Yes, rosemary. I remember looking at that tasting note in disbelief, and then experiencing about the same disbelief by how much I loved the rosemary flavour!"

- Dean, Director of Coffee