28Brazil
39,470,000 bags (ICO 2009/10)In-depth country profile: production, varieties, classification, history, current situation and points still uncertain. Region: South America.
Brazil is the country of wide-open spaces. The world's leading producer and exporter, it alone produces about a quarter of the world's coffee supply. Its “fazendas” are among the most technologically advanced in the world, capable of processing enormous volumes very quickly.
But reducing Brazil to volume would be to miss a shift: the country increasingly presents specialty coffees, quality becoming a real selling point, supported by the public authorities. It is also, less well known, the world's leading coffee-consuming country, ahead of the United States.
- Botanical species
- Arabica (85%), Canephora (15%)
- Altitude
- 200 to 1,300 m
- Harvest
- Mechanical
- Processing
- Wet process and dry process
- Sorting
- Mechanical or electronic
- Harvest period
- March to November
- Packaging
- 60-kg bag
Recent volume 65 million bags in 2025-2026, 71.9 projected in 2026-2027, a recordUSDA FAS, Coffee: World Markets and Trade, June 2025 and June 2026
Geographic origin
One of the following: the port of shipment (e.g. Santos), the state (e.g. Minas Gerais) or the region (e.g. Sul de Minas).
Number of defects (“type,” 300 g sample)
| Type | Max defects |
| Type 2 | 8 |
| Type 2/3 | 12,5 |
| Type 3 | 17 |
| Type 3/4 | 23,5 |
| Type 4 | 30 |
| Type 4/5 | 58,5 |
| Type 5 | 87 |
Bean size: the screen (0.4 mm) runs from 13 to 20 for flat beans, from 9 to 12 for round beans (Caracoli / Peaberry).
Taste: softness and finesse
| Softness (from + to − soft) | Finesse (from + to − fine) |
| Strictly Soft | Fine Cup |
| Soft | Good Cup |
| Softish | Fair Cup |
| Hard | Poor Cup |
| Hardish | Bad Cup |
| Rioy | - |
Example of a typical description: “Brazil, Cerrado Type 2 screen 18 Strictly Soft Fine Cup.”
History
The first Brazilian plantation was established in Pará in 1723, with plants from French Guiana. It failed, without anyone knowing why.
Legend · The famous version has it that the Portuguese Francisco de Melo Palheta brought the seeds back from Cayenne. He had been sent there in 1727 to arbitrate a border dispute, and Guiana refused to export its seeds. The governor's wife is said to have slipped them to him in a farewell bouquet.
What is established comes down to two propositions: Portugal was looking for seeds, and Brazil got some. The exact route belongs to the story.
Intensive cultivation then started from the Portuguese colonies of Pará and Amazonas, in 1752. Two dated contributions followed.
- 1760João Alberto Castello Branco brought a coffee plant from Goa to Rio.
- 1774The monk Molke gave seeds to the Capuchin monastery in Rio.
- The Brazilian twentieth century is the century of politically managed overproduction. The 1906-1907 harvest reached 20,190,000 bags when the world consumed fewer: São Paulo launched “valorization,” buying and stockpiling to hold prices
- and in 1908 placed a loan of 75 million dollars. The crash of 1929 left the country with unsellable stocks
- from 1931, the state destroyed coffee. Then
- on the night of July 17 to 18, 1975, a so-called black frost fell on Paraná and southern São Paulo: about a billion and a half trees killed, and a world price that more than tripled.
Brazil is also the world's leading breeder. The Campinas Agronomic Institute produced Caturra (a dwarf mutation of Bourbon spotted around 1915-1918, registered in 1951), Mundo Novo (a natural cross of Sumatra Typica by red Bourbon, 1943, registered in 1977), Catuai (yellow Caturra by Mundo Novo, 1949, registered in 1972) and Icatu, a tetraploidized canephora crossed with Bourbon. Maragogype was spotted at Maragogipe, in the State of Bahia, around 1870, and Conilon, a Guinean-type canephora, was introduced in 1912 in Espírito Santo.
World Coffee Research, Coffee Varieties Catalog 2025, Caturra, Mundo Novo, Catuai, Icatu, Maragogipe, Conilon profiles; Setotaw et al., Crop Science 53 (2013)Today
The volume at the head of the profile, 39,470,000 bags, is that of the profile (ICO 2009-2010). It has aged, and the recent-volume benchmark placed higher up in this profile corrects it.
The rank, for its part, has not moved: the world's leading producer and exporter, with about a quarter of world supply. Harvesting is mechanical, between 200 and 1,300 meters, by the wet process as well as the dry process.
Espírito Santo has also released clonal varieties of Conilon. A clonal variety is not a seed-sown lineage but an assemblage of cuttings, each identical to the plant it came from.
Vitória Incaper 8142 combines thirteen of them, compatible with one another. Robustão Capixaba, for its part, was selected for its drought tolerance.
Country Profiles, Marco De Sousa Rosa, 2026; World Coffee Research, Coffee Varieties Catalog 2025, Vitória Incaper 8142 and Emcapa 8141 profiles; Ferrão et al. 2020The country of volume has also become a country of specialty: pulped natural (cereja descascado, in Portuguese) appeared after the dissolution of the Brazilian Coffee Institute and has spread around the world. Brazil is, finally, the world's leading coffee-consuming country, ahead of the United States.
LC ch. 17b; Country Profiles, Marco De Sousa Rosa, 2026Gray areas
- The story of Palheta and the bouquet is a legend: no primary source attests it.
- The number of trees killed by the 1975 frost, “about a billion and a half,” is an estimate taken from Pendergrast, not a count.
- The quarter of world supply attributed to Brazil varies strongly from year to year and with the biennial production cycle.
- The exact year of the dissolution of the Brazilian Coffee Institute is not given by the sources consulted.