Pocos De Caldas, Brazil, June 24 - Burgundy cherries clustered on Brazil's coffee trees are the long-awaited fruit of a kind climate this year, but unexpected rains this month mean the crop is not yet home and dry, growers say.
The world's top coffee grower is still in the initial stages of a harvest forecast to turn out anywhere between 39 million and 43.5 million 60-kg bags of beans, compared to around 36 million bags during the last off-year crop in 2007.
Coffee output in the South American country swings from one year to the next, but excellent rainfall during this crop's development means the dip will be less pronounced in the 2009/10 season.
"Everything has been going perfectly except for these rains out of season," said Mario Cesar Simao Filho of Bourbon Specialty Coffees, an exporter in Pocos de Caldas, a town in a valley surrounded by coffee farms in its verdant hills.
A cold front sweeping southeast brought a few days of rain this month here in southern Minas Gerais state, which produces about half Brazil's coffee. That briefly halted harvesting and jeopardized the quality of beans already being dried.
"When it rains all the humidity comes back, fermentation starts and you lose quality," said Diogo de Macedo, manager at the vast Recreio farm with more than 200 hectares of coffee.
"It won't be our best coffee but it is still fit for drinking," de Macedo said of the portion of beans affected by the rain. With such large production, he said mechanical driers could not handle all the beans workers brought under cover.
He said fermented coffee has a characteristic taste and buyers who screen coffee samples for defects, pay less for it.
As the working day drew to a close on the farm on Tuesday, workers lay resting on the grass beside the 18 bags of cherries they picked using hand-held mechanical harvesters that look similar to garden strimmers.
WINTER BEGINS
Light rains could return briefly in the next few days private weather forecast Somar has said and the start of winter this week also heightens the risk of a crop-damaging frost.
Brazil's National Meteorology Institute, Inmet, gave a rare warning of frost, indicating that "isolated areas" of Minas Gerais could see some frost on Thursday while Somar expected the area would dodge extreme cold.
Despite textbook conditions during the crop's development, excluding the recent showers, production is likely to have suffered, albeit slightly, due to the sparse use of fertilizer last year after prices nearly doubled.
"Last year very few people did fertilizing (in the Pocos area) because of the cost. It was high. This harvest is already suffering the effects," said Irimeu Nascimento of the CafePocos cooperative, who expected fair quality nonetheless.
Usually, the effect of fertilizer on coffee trees is most evident two crops after it has been applied. Its nutrients help the tree form new extensions to its branches on which the crop will develop after first sprouting new leaves for one season.
But growers and buyers said the input also gave a small boost to trees in the season that follows its application. Sparing use last year, however, meant the effect would be minimal to this crop.