Brazil Prima Qualita

The Brazil Prima Qualita is a marquis Vournas Coffee offering featured in our lineup since 2002—it’s currently in its 21st year for good reason! Of the 15,000+ producers associated with the growing cooperative, approximately 95% of Prima Qualita producers are small farmers. Brazil, being the world’s top producer of arabica coffee, is sometimes unfairly portrayed as a non-descript, blender-type origin for espresso cremas or a chocolatey base note. Our Brazil Prima Qualita shatters this notion, standing alone as either a pour-over or single origin espresso. In the cup it’s sweet with notes of tangerine-orange, apricot and cashew, heavy body, low acid, and good balance.

Brazil Prima Qualita is sourced from Mundo Novo, Yellow Catuai, Red Catuai, and Icatu, and partially handpicked—a rarity from Brazil, where harvesting is predominantly mechanized. To create the Brazil Prima Qualita, the processing mill acquires three different varieties from three different regions. The ‘Cerrado’ portion comes from southern Minas Gerais, and is dry processed with low acidity, to impart a nice sweetness and good amount of body to the overall cup. The second Minas Gerais portion has very good acidity, mixes well with the Cerrado and is produced and sourced from one region’s highest quality sustainable producers. The ‘Otimo’ (or excellent) portion is a pulp natural that uses only fully ripened beans carefully selected to impart the distinct orangey-citrus note and additional acidity in the cup. Pulp natural Otimo cherries are stripped of their skin and slowly dried in the sun with a portion of the natural fruit mucilage left intact. Once processed and blended, the Brazil Prima Qualita parchment is milled to strict specifications, removing any defects, broken beans or blacks and passed through a 17/18 screen final stage, creating one of the highest grade and quality Brazilian coffees on the market.