Lot DT 15 - 02/02: Zezé (LOT 02)

ZEZE is the five-year-old narrator from My Sweet Orange Tree (Meu Pé de Laranja Lima), a Brazilian young adult literature classic where the reader observes many social changes from Zeze’s childlike perspective. Interrupting a comfortable life, his family moves to a simpler and cheaper neighborhood after Zeze’s father gets fired. The new house has a backyard with a couple of fruit trees and, in an attempt to make the kids feel at home, their mother let each of them choose a “pet tree”. Zeze’s siblings obviously choose the bigger, more beautiful trees and because he’s the last to pick, he has no choice but getting a small and frail orange tree. Despite of the tree’s modesty, the boy grows very fond of it – he talks to the tree every day, caring deeply about it and making it his best friend. From his dialogues with the tree, the reader sees through Zeze’s broken home, his abusive father, lonely mother and the difficulty to adjust to the new life. In our opinion, Zeze is the perfect representative for this coffee: it’s bright like a child and presents notes of orange (of course), tangerine, peach, and strawberry with floral undertones, the sweetness of molasses and a phosphoric acidity.

SH3 is a varietal developed at the Agronomic Institute of Campinas, our trusted research partner. It’s a cross between a lineage of red Catuai and BA10. The trees are pretty tall, very resistant to coffee leaf rust and present nice productivity with great drink quality. All of this wasn’t easy to make, though – this is the sixth generation of SH3 and considering that each generation takes around 2,5 years, it’s a pretty long time until it gets to your cup.

Over the last years, we’ve noticed how SH3 behaves well under natural anaerobic fermentation and has been featured on our auction a couple of times. Because the trees are relatively young, we handpicked them and later place the cherries inside a tank equipped with an airlock valve: this system allows oxygen to get out of the tank but stops anything from getting inside. As the cherries ferment, they release CO2 and, because carbon dioxide is denser than oxygen, it pushes the lighter gas out through the valve. After a few hours, the tank environment becomes completely anaerobic and allows certain microorganisms the perfect conditions for fermentation and enzymatic reactions to happen inside of the beans.

Varietal: Daterra’s SH3
Process: Natural Anaerobic Fermentation
Screen size: 16/18
Harvesting: Handpicking
Drying: Patio
Plot: BV 40