How to Brew Hand-Ground Coffee with Brazilian Red Cherry Premium Coffee Beans_How to Use Brazilian Pour-Over Coffee Filter Cup

Brazilian Coffee — Red Cherry (Santo Antônio Estate)

Flavor: Nuts, Chocolate, Buckwheat Tea

Processing Method: Natural/Medium

Santo Antônio is a small farm on the slopes of Piatã, in Brazil's Bahia state, part of the Diamantina Plateau region, where the average annual temperature is 21 degrees. The current owner, Antônio Macedo Souza, inherited the land from his father. With the coffee trees yielding poorly at the time, Antônio gave up cultivation entirely—until 1998, when he found help from the local coffee farmers' association (ASCAMP), and the fate of the little estate changed for good.

ASCAMP is a Piatã-based organization that assists coffee farmers who own land but lack the resources to invest in coffee farming. After joining, Antônio grew the farm's coffee trees to 6,000, and through the whole family's combined effort the venture gradually stabilized and became the household's main source of income.

Most of the work is handled by family members, with outside laborers hired only for the harvest, which runs from July to September. Each day, only mature, bright-red cherries are carefully picked, then processed and sun-dried on the farm's drying yard, where they are raked 18-20 times a day. Once dried, the beans are batch-numbered and stored separately for later sale.

FrontStreet Coffee's Brewing Parameter Recommendations:

How to Brew Brazilian Coffee [Red Cherry] Well?

FrontStreet Coffee's Pour-Over Reference: Weigh out 15 g of Red Cherry coffee, grind it medium in the grinder—the particles should be slightly coarser than table salt. We use the BG grinder at setting 6A (50% pass rate on the standard sieve), water at 88°C, extracted with a Kono/Kalita dripper, at a recommended coffee-to-water ratio of around 1:14.

Start pouring hot water from the kettle in clockwise circles from the center of the dripper. Begin timing as soon as you start brewing, reaching 30 g within 15 seconds, then stop. When the timer hits 1 minute, begin the second pour. Again pour clockwise with the center of the dripper as your focal point, taking care that the stream never hits the seam where the coffee bed meets the filter paper—that's what causes channeling.

When you reach the outermost ring of grounds, leave that ring untouched and work your circles back inward toward the center. At 2 minutes 10 seconds the coffee should reach 210 g, and the brew is complete.

Japanese-Style Iced Pour-Over [Red Cherry]

FrontStreet Coffee's Iced Pour-Over Reference for Red Cherry:

Brazilian Coffee [Red Cherry], medium-dark roast, BG grinder setting 5R (60% standard sieve pass rate)

20 g of coffee, 150 g of ice, 150 g of hot water. The water should be 1°C hotter than the 88°C used for the standard pour-over. For normal brewing we grind at the Fuji 3.5 setting; for the iced version, slightly finer at Fuji 3. The recommended coffee-to-(water+ice) ratio is 1:15.

Bloom with 40 g of water for 30 seconds.

Segmented pouring: first segment 60 g of water, second segment 40 g. Use a relatively fine but tall water column, pouring with enough force to stir and agitate the bed so the grounds tumble fully—just keep the liquid level from rising too high, and don't hit the filter paper at the edges.

Total extraction time should be about 2.5 minutes (in line with a normal extraction for 20 g of coffee).

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

If this nutty, chocolate-forward Brazilian style is your thing, FrontStreet Coffee's Cerrado Red Bourbon is a classic worth trying. Cerrado is one of Brazil's best-known coffee regions, and this pulped-natural lot—roasted medium—opens with rich aromas of creamy peanut, toast, caramel, and hazelnut, round on the palate with no sharp acidity, just a gentle touch of bitterness. It works beautifully as a pour-over and is equally at home in a moka pot, espresso machine (SOE), siphon, or French press.

Want to explore further up Brazil's quality ladder? FrontStreet Coffee's Queen Estate Yellow Bourbon comes from Mogiana, near southern Minas, where fertile red volcanic soil feeds full, aromatic fruit. The rare Yellow Bourbon mutation gives a cleaner fruit character, and the cup reveals a sugarcane sweetness you won't find in other origins, alongside fruit and chocolate notes.