Brazil Southern Sanctuary Starmaya

A complex coffee with notes of dates, cocoa, sweet liquorice & passion fruit

Producer: Luis Paulo Dias Pereira Jr.
Region: Carmo de Minas
Variety: Starmaya
Process: Anaerobic Natural

Santuario Sul, meaning “sanctuary south,” is an innovative piece of work. Santuario Sul started as a small part of the Irmas Pereira farm, but is now a completely separate farm run by Luis Paulo Dias Pereira Jr. This is as much a testing station as it is a coffee farm. The farm totals 120 hectares, of which 80 are used for coffee cultivation. Here they grow over 30 different varieties, everything from traditional Brazilian varieties like Yellow Bourbon to exotic varieties like Sudan Rume, Starmaya, Geisha and SL28.

At Santuario Sul, they have also focused on innovative processing methods; the coffee lots from here are either natural, fermented, or honey processed. In 2018, they acquired a fermentation tank that also allows them to experiment with processing. "Regular" natural processed coffee is a process where the coffee cherries are picked, sorted, and laid out to dry with the pulp on. What happens in the natural drying process is that glucose and fructose from the cherry are incorporated, giving us a coffee with a full body and high sweetness.

This lot of coffee is a juicy and funky Anaerobic Natural coffee of the Starmaya variety, a groundbreaking F1 hybrid with genetic roots from Ethiopian wild coffee. So here you get the best of coffee flavour from Brazil mixed with the juicy, floral, and intense character often found in really good coffee from East Africa.