Santa Lucia / Brazil

About the Coffee

Helcio Carneiro Pinto has been working in coffee since he was 15 years old. In 1976, he and his wife Glycia took over Fazenda Santa Lucia in Carmo de Minas, Minas Gerais, Brazil. At the time, the focus was on volume, not quality, and access to information about specialty coffee was hard to come by. That changed in the 1990s when Helcio became one of the founding members of Aprocam, the Association of Coffee Producers from the Mantiqueira Region, a group of local farmers who brought in scientists and coffee experts to help them understand what it actually takes to produce high-quality coffee.

Through Aprocam, Helcio was introduced to the Pulped Natural processing method, where the coffee cherry's outer skin is removed but some of the fruit mucilage is left on the seed during drying. He was one of the first producers in the Carmo de Minas region to build the infrastructure needed to do it properly. Since 2017, coffees from Santa Lucia have been formally evaluated and scored in specialty markets, and the farm has built a consistent reputation in key buying regions. Helcio grows the Yellow Bourbon variety at Santa Lucia, a cultivar well-suited to the Mantiqueira highlands where the farm sits.

Helcio is candid about challenges ahead. He points to shrinking farm labor as a real concern for the region and believes producers need to actively prepare for how that will change the way coffee is grown and harvested in Carmo de Minas. It's a practical outlook from someone who has spent decades building something slowly, the right way.

About Rosso

Rosso has been roasting coffee for over 16 years, based in Calgary, Alberta. They take a considered approach to sourcing, building relationships with producers and focusing on coffees that reflect where and how they were grown.

Their roasting approach leans on curiosity rather than formula, looking for what each coffee is capable of rather than fitting it into a standard profile. The Santa Lucia is a good example of that: a straightforward, low-acidity Brazilian that rewards attention to how it's roasted and brewed.