Lot DT 04 - 02/03: Ceci (LOT 03)

In the romance The Guarani (O Guarani) by José de Alencar, Ceci is the love interest of Peri – he’s a native Brazilian and she’s a white and rich young woman. While her actual name is Cecilia, her nickname comes from the native tupi word “sasy”, which means “pain”: Ceci is Peri’s pain because she doesn’t love him back :( . Even though she can’t correspond to Peri’s love, Ceci is a sweet girl and inspired this sweet coffee that tastes like candy: the cupper will find flowers, strawberry, and almonds on the nose, and the cup presents raw grape juice, strawberry, watermelon and jasmine, a candy-like sweetness and malic acidity.
We don’t mean to brag, but the Aramosa is super fancy – this varietal is so exclusive that it’s not even commercially available yet, meaning that very few farmers have it. Daterra received the seeds as an experiment with our research partner IAC - the Agronomic Institute of Campinas.

The Aramosa is a cross between Coffea Arabica and Coffea Racemosa. The original idea behind this crossing was to inherit Racemosa’s low caffeine and drought resistance while keeping Arabica’s flavor – and it worked! Aramosa beans have a lower caffeine content than regular Arabica beans and, in Daterra’s terroir, always taste super floral.

The first step to make Ceci was harvesting the cherries, and we did it mechanically. How can such a delicate coffee come out of mechanization? We build our own machines, and we do it in a way that only the ripest cherries are collected – the green ones remain on the tree, giving them time to continue their maturation journeys. Then, we manually select the cherries so only the ripest ones proceed to the next step: the Aramosa cherries were fermented inside a hermetically closed tank equipped with an airlock valve, making the CO2 released during the fermentation push all oxygen out. After a couple of hours, the whole tank is completely devoid of oxygen and the anaerobic microorganisms can work their magic on the beans.