How to Perform Pour-Over Coffee Blooming with Brazil Agua Limpa Estate Beans & How to Identify Quality Pour-Over Coffee

Brazil Coffee: Agua Limpa

Region/Estate: Agua Limpa

Altitude: 1050m

Processing Plant/Method: Caffee Brazil/Natural

Flavor Description: Red wine, chocolate, hazelnut, berry

The Farm

Farm full name: Sitio Santa Cruz da Agua Limpa

Farm owner: Milton Moscardini

Region: Mogiana

This bean comes from northern São Paulo, and tasting it, you might easily mistake it for an African coffee rather than a Brazilian one. It hails from São Paulo's traditional northern coffee country, yet it is completely unlike the classic Brazilian profile. Conventionally, we think of São Paulo as an area of many volcanoes, where the soil texture favors full-bodied coffee without much distinctive flavor. This bean overturns that fixed idea entirely.

Owner Milton Moscardini takes an active part in various quality-improvement education projects, constantly refining and experimenting. He produces high-quality green beans with African characteristics: clean, clear, and fresh-tasting even when natural processed. The farm keeps experimenting and pushing itself.

FrontStreet Coffee Brewing Suggestions

How to Brew Brazil Coffee (Agua Limpa Estate) Well

Hand-pour reference: Weigh 15g of Agua Limpa Estate grounds and grind to a medium setting. The particles should be slightly coarser than table salt. We use a BG grinder set to 6A, with a 50% pass rate on a standard sieve, water at 88°C, a Kono or Kalita dripper, and a recommended coffee-to-water ratio of about 1:14.

Pour the hot water from the kettle in clockwise circles, centered on the middle of the dripper. Start timing when brewing begins. Reach 30g of water in 15 seconds, then stop pouring. At the 1-minute mark, begin the second pour. As before, pour in clockwise circles centered on the middle of the dripper, keeping the stream away from where the coffee bed meets the filter paper to avoid channeling.

Leave a ring's width of space when pouring toward the outermost coffee, then work circle by circle back toward the center. By 2 minutes and 10 seconds, brew up to 210g to complete the process.

Japanese-Style Iced Hand-Pour (Agua Limpa Estate)

Iced hand-pour reference:

Brazil Coffee Agua Limpa Estate, medium-dark roast, BG grinder setting 5R (60% pass rate on a standard sieve).

20g of grounds, 150g of ice, 150g of hot water. The water temperature should be 1°C higher than the normal hand-pour recommendation of 88°C. A normal grind is a Fuji 3.5 setting, while the iced pour uses a slightly finer half-step down at Fuji 3. The recommended coffee-to-(water-plus-ice) ratio is 1:15.

Bloom with 40g of water for 30 seconds.

Segmented pouring: 60g of water in the first segment and 40g in the second. Use a relatively fine but tall water column, stirring and impacting forcefully so the grounds roll fully. Be careful, though, not to let the liquid level rise too high or hit the edge of the filter paper.

The whole extraction takes roughly 2.5 minutes, close to the normal extraction time for 20g of grounds.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Brazilian coffee brings a moderate acidity and a fine balance of sweetness, bitterness, and body that suits a medium roast beautifully. To taste a classic Brazilian single origin, try the FrontStreet Brazil Cerrado Red Bourbon, a half-washed bean from the well-known Cerrado growing region. Roasted medium, it shows rich aromas of creamy peanut, toasted bread, caramel, and hazelnut, with a rounded, mellow cup that is low in acidity and carries a light hint of bitterness. It works in a hand-pour, a moka pot, an espresso SOE, a siphon, or a French press.

For a fruitier take, the FrontStreet Brazil Queen Estate comes from Mogiana, near South Minas, where the fertile red volcanic soil gives the fruit full nutrients and rich aroma. It is the rare Yellow Bourbon, a natural mutation of Red Bourbon with a cleaner fruit character. Brewed as a pour-over, in a moka pot, or on a home espresso machine, it reveals a sugarcane sweetness unique to the estate, along with fruit and chocolate.