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Thelma de Lima Peixoto has been married to José August Peixoto, a rural coffee producer, for 45 years. José Augusto Peixoto is a 4th-generation coffee producer in the city of Ibirací, Minas Gerais. His father, Nelson Peixoto, produced coffee his entire life, as did his grandfather and great-grandfather, a tradition for over 150 years. He was born on his father’s coffee farm, adjacent to his current farm, Fazenda São José da Boa Vista. José Augusto remembers planting coffee trees in the yard when he was 5 years old, picking beans and going to the city of Ibirací on a mule to sell his lots with his family. Eventually, José Augusto went to live in the city, where he went to high school, the he left to study medicine. During the 70s, José Augusto started buying small farms around his family’s farm, creating his own coffee production. And thus he began Thelma and José Augusto’s over 50-year tradition of coffee production. They started selling their coffees at the local cooperative and followed the ups and downs of the commodity market in Brazil. With the passing of José Augusto’s mother at the end of the 90s and later of his father in 2012, Thelma and José Augusto inherited plots of land adjacent to theirs and over the years they built up their farm, today known as Recanto do Mato.

Coffee processing system 
At Fazenda Recanto do Mato, the harvest occurs from June to the end of August, the best lots of the specialty drink generally being processed in August. All of the crops are harvested separately, some by machine and some by hand. All of the Fazenda Recento do Mato coffee lots are dried naturally on patios, where they are raked and lined continually throughout the day for 7 to 10 days per lot. After drying, the coffee is transferred to granaries inside the warehouse where the coffee rests for a few days inside the cherry. The coffee rests, is separated and processed. Thelma and José Augusto have the capacity to separate coffees of screen size 16-17 and up on the farm itself. In 2015, they invested in warehousing and processing, giving the farm the infrastructure to process specialty coffee beans and send screen size 16 or 17 and up from the farm.

Concern about quality 
Thelma and José Augusto has been working over the past 10 years to improve the quality of their coffees mainly to sell them for a price based on the quality of the coffee and not that of the market. The farm employs a certified agronomist who visits regularly and applies innovative organic agricultural products. In addition to this, the farm is entirely catalogued by lot, which, during the harvest, gives them the complete ability to separate lots by cultivar and trace them through processing to maintain the properties of each lot. During the harvest, care is taken to pick only the ripe fruits and, if necessary, several harvests of a single coffee tree are done to be certain that only the ripe fruits are picked. Processing the lots at the farm itself, and not in a cooperative or mobile processing center, also permits quality measures to be maintained during the entire coffee processing process, even separation by screen. With these measures, Fazenda Recanto do mato is able to have 30-40% of its production be specialty coffees (receiving scores of 85 or above from Q-graders certified in Brazil or abroad). For the past two years, coffees from this farm have been exported directly to the Peixoto family coffee shop (José Augusto Peixoto’s daughter and son-in- law) in Phoenix, Arizona, www.peixotoco ee.com, where it is roasted in small quantities, distributed to highly-regarded coffee shops and restaurants in the American market, and served to customers of re ned taste seeking specialty coffees.