Which Brazilian Coffee Beans Are the Best - Santos Coffee with Moderate Acidity and Slightly Sweet Taste

FrontStreet Coffee - Introduction to Brazil Santos Coffee

Brazil Santos Coffee

Among Brazilian coffees, Santos is the most valued and best known. Bourbon Santos has no particularly outstanding strengths, but also no obvious weaknesses. It is mild and smooth, with low acidity, moderate body, and a subtle sweetness. Those flavors blend together so well that separating them is a genuine test for the palate, and that is exactly what its fans love about it.

Because it is mild and unassuming, Bourbon Santos is especially suited to the most common roasting and brewing methods. At the same time, this unremarkable coffee is the best ingredient for espresso and a range of specialty drinks. Bourbon Santos can form a golden-brown crema on the surface of espresso and give the coffee a slightly sweet taste.

The most famous Brazilian coffee is the ancient Bourbon Santos grown on certain estates in the Cerrado region of Minas Gerais in southeastern Brazil. The name Santos comes from the port where the coffee was shipped. Brazilian beans are classified and graded by multiple standards, the primary one being the export port. From the port of Santos come "Flat Bean Santos" and the superior "Bourbon Santos." Bourbon coffee is best drunk fresh, because its acidity increases with age. After the trees produce some new beans, the beans become larger and lose some flavor, and this coffee is then called "Flat Bean Santos."

"Brazil Santos" was once quite well known in the coffee industry and probably brings back memories for many enthusiasts. We hold no particular prejudice against Santos; at the very least, our generation of coffee professionals and the one before grew up drinking it.

In the early days, before the concept of specialty coffee existed, coffee was simply a traded commodity, what we now generally call commercial beans. Commercial beans were usually not finely divided by origin but named after the country of origin and the distribution port. That is why we so easily encounter references to Colombian coffee (the country of origin) and Mocha coffee (Yemen's Mocha port).

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

To taste the Santos lineage today, FrontStreet Coffee's Brazil Cerrado Red Bourbon is a classic single-origin Brazilian bean. Cerrado is a well-known region for high-quality beans, and this lot is the Red Bourbon variety common in South America. Medium-roasted, it shows rich creamy peanut, toast, caramel, and hazelnut aromas, a rounded body, no acidity, and a mild bittersweet note, and it handles pour-over, moka pot, espresso SOE, siphon, and French press with equal ease.

For a rarer take on Brazilian Bourbon, FrontStreet Coffee's Queen Estate coffee comes from Mogiana, where fertile red volcanic soil helps the fruit develop a full aroma. Its rare Yellow Bourbon variety is a mutation of Red Bourbon with a cleaner fruit character, yielding the sugarcane sweetness, fruit, and chocolate notes that are hard to find in other regions.