What Are the Varieties of Brazilian Coffee Beans and What Are the Characteristics of the Semi-Washed Method and Why Is It Also Called Semi-Dry Method

FrontStreet Coffee - Introduction to Brazilian Coffee Varieties and Semi-Washed Processing

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Brazilian coffee comes in numerous varieties, the majority unwashed and sun-dried, and it is classified by state of origin and shipping port. Brazil has 21 states, 17 of which produce coffee, but four states account for 98% of the national total. Brazilian coffee has lower acidity, complemented by a sweet and bitter taste. It is exceptionally smooth on the palate with a faint grassy aroma, offering a refreshing fragrance with a hint of bitterness, smooth and sweet, and leaving a pleasant, satisfying aftertaste.

Despite coffee's diversity, Brazilian coffee suits popular tastes. It comes from the world's coffee heartland as a low-acidity, medium-roasted bean.

Brazil is vividly described as the "giant" and "monarch" of the coffee world. It has roughly 39.7 billion coffee trees, and small farmers now grow 75% of Brazil's total output. The number of people engaged in coffee production in Brazil is two to three times that of Colombia, the world's second-largest producing country.

Catuai, Caturra, Mundo Novo and Bourbon are the four major coffee varieties in Brazil.

What is Semi-Sun (Pulped Natural) Coffee?

Let's start with the most basic definition. The concept of Pulped Natural originated in Brazil twenty years ago and was initially called "hulled cherry coffee," because this method removes the skin before drying the cherries but must retain all of the pulp mucilage.

The process falls between sun-drying and washed processing. In the sun-drying method, coffee cherries are dried completely in the sun, while the washed method completely removes the fruit skin, pulp and mucilage layers covering the bean before drying.

Coffee in processing, photo by CeCafe.

Honey processing (especially red honey), semi-washed and semi-dried methods are often considered to have evolved from Pulped Natural, partly because they all use a depulper to remove the cherry's skin and pulp before drying.

What differs is the proportion of pulp or mucilage retained after depulping. The most important feature of Pulped Natural is that it removes only the fruit skin.

Knowledge point: The more mucilage retained, the darker the bean color, and the stronger and richer the sweetness and mouthfeel you can taste.

In short: FrontStreet Coffee is a coffee research center, happy to share coffee knowledge with everyone. We share without reservation only to help more friends fall in love with coffee, and we hold three coffee events with deep discounts every month, because FrontStreet Coffee wants more people to enjoy the best coffee at the lowest price. This has been FrontStreet Coffee's principle for six years.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Pulped natural is the perfect way to taste Brazil at its most balanced, and the FrontStreet Cerrado Red Bourbon is a classic example of the style. Cerrado is a well-known Brazilian region known for high-quality beans, and this lot uses the Red Bourbon variety common across South America. A medium roast brings out rich aromas of cream peanut, toasted bread, caramel and hazelnut, with a rounded body, no acidity and a light bittersweet edge. It suits pour-over, but also moka pot, espresso SOE, siphon and French press.

For a rare and distinctive Brazilian single origin, the FrontStreet Queen's Estate Brazil is grown in Mogiana, close to South Minas, where fertile red volcanic soil lets the fruit absorb plenty of nutrients and develop a dense aroma. The farm's Yellow Bourbon, a natural mutation of Red Bourbon, offers a cleaner fruit character, so pour-over, moka pot or a home espresso machine will reveal the sugarcane sweetness, fruit notes and chocolate flavors that other regions do not have.

Because Brazil is low in acidity, balanced and affordable, it is also the first choice in many specialty espresso recipes. The full-crema FrontStreet Classic Blend, the nutty Boutique Blend, the well-balanced Black Cocoa Blend and the cafe-focused Commercial Blend all contain Brazilian beans, which contribute chocolate and cream aromas, a gentle sweet-sour-bitter balance and the stability that makes extraction predictable.