Lot DT 02 - 02/02: Baleia (LOT 02)

This bright coffee is inspired by BALEIA, the lovely pet from Barren Lives (Vidas Secas), by Graciliano Ramos. The romance portrays the extremely poor reality of a family traveling the Brazilian northeast in search of fertile lands to settle down. While Ramos depicts certain family members in a rough and almost irrational way, the dog Baleia is presented as the most human-like character: she has dreams, opinions, and desires, and throughout the whole book she is not shown as a pet, but rather as the most sensitive family member. Originally published in 1938, Vidas Secas is to this day one of the most important literary pieces of Brazil.

The Naomi is a cross between C. Arabica and Robusta with selections performed by somaclonal variations in a research partnership between Daterra and Illy. This varietal was first planted into our lands in 1995 and, today, we have plants in their fourth and fifth generations. If you’re wondering why this varietal has such a classy name, we’re delighted to reveal that it is, indeed, a homage to the legendary model.

To make Baleia, our cherries were harvested mechanically – yeah, you read it right! Our harvesting machines are built from scratch at the farm and they are designed for coffee quality: we make them move and vibrate in a much softer and gentler way, which makes only the ripest cherries detach from the branch – that’s our selective mechanical harvesting. After a thorough manual selection, the ripest cherries are fermented in an oxygen-rich environment without using water, yeast or any other additives – it’s an open, natural fermentation