In search of great beans

Brazil is actually the world's largest coffee producer, accounting for a whopping one-third of all coffee bean production in the world. Over five million people in Brazil are employed by the trade; most of those are involved with the cultivation and harvesting of more than three billion coffee plants.

Coffee beans come from the seed of a fruit called a coffee “cherry." It's about the size of a blueberry, growing in vibrant colorful clusters on short, shrubby trees. Octavio’s farms consist of five million trees, which stand between six and ten feet high and sweep the landscape in long, elegantly curving rows.

Approximately 40 percent of Octavio's harvest is hand-picked, which requires workers to pull fruit from tree, in a method essentially unchanged for centuries. This may seem like a tedious method, but for the younger trees (which can't stand the strain of heavy machinery) or the very oldest (which aren't planted in rows widely enough to accommodate it), hand-picking is the only option.

Excerpt from the January issue of epicure.