June 26 - Rains are falling in Brazil coffee areas, heaping worries about quality and extra work on farmers who are trying to dry new beans and suspending harvesting, growers and forecasters said Friday.
The 2009/10 harvest in the world's top coffee grower has been underway for more than a month, but rains which returned this week mark the second time showers have interrupted it and jeopardized bean quality.
"I'm worried because it makes it difficult to dry and causes damage," said farm hand Ricardo Rodolpho at a 13-hectare farm on the outskirts of Tres Pontas, a densely-planted coffee area in Minas Gerais state, which grows about half Brazil's supply.
Coffee he had harvested a few days earlier was piled up and covered with a plastic sheet in the yard, but other beans he had spread out only hours before the rain arrived were still exposed.
Private weather forecaster Somar said the rains were widespread and could persist for another week, causing major headaches for farmers trying to organize laborers to harvest and trying to dry the coffee beans they have already picked.
Most of Brazil's produce is prepared as "natural" coffee which is also the processing method most susceptible to damage from excess moisture. Unlike other methods, a sugary husk is left to dry on the bean but it starts to ferment when moisture enters, infusing a bad taste into the bean.
"These white patches are from damp problems because it wasn't dried properly," said Luiz Antonio Furlan, a coffee broker in the Minas coffee town of Varginha, spreading out a sample of beans on an inspection table with pale traces across the beans' surface.
The grains had a distinct fermented smell compared to other samples he showed, which were free of moisture damage.
Furlan, who provides professional training on coffee sampling and the tasting process known as cupping, said fermentation usually spoils quality, as the husk's sugars burn up and heat the pile of coffee to around 60 degrees Celsius (140 degrees Fahrenheit).
"You couldn't even put your hand inside (a fermenting coffee pile)," he said.
Other methods used to process beans, washed and semi-washed, are less common in Brazil. Fermentation of the thin parchment that dries on the bean's surface is in this case useful to the taste and not harsh because the husk is removed first.
An agronomist at the Unicoop cooperative in Tres Pontas, Flavio Botrel, said rain sometimes knocked ripe fruit from the branches to the ground, bringing further risks.
Rains a fortnight ago hurt the quality of the coffee exposed to moisture then. Some farms are equipped with mechanical harvesters with revolving heated drums but often they can not dry all of the coffee quickly enough to avoid some spoiling.
This year's harvest had enjoyed months of rains which some growers said had been near perfect in quantity and regularity during the crop's delicate developmental stages. The weather turned dry as harvesting began until showers returned a about fortnight ago.