By Oliver Griffin
SAO PAULO, March 24 (Reuters) – A fourth-generation coffee farmer said he is ramping up sales from the only Brazilian plantation of rare eugenioides coffee, aiming to fetch as much as 50 times the price of the arabica beans found in most gourmet brews.
Luiz Paulo Dias Pereira Filho said he expects his harvest of eugenioides, an ancestor of the arabica plant, to sell for 1 million reais ($190,476) for 10 standardized 60-kilogram bags. Arabica prices have slipped this year to near $400 per bag.
“It’s an extremely sweet coffee,” Pereira Filho said of the rare species. “It doesn’t have bitterness because its caffeine level is practically considered decaf.”
He has historically sold bags of the beans to customers in Taiwan and Saudi Arabia, among other countries. Last year, he sold three bags of eugenioides for 90,000 reais ($17,148) each.
The sales underscore appetite for niche specialty coffees even as the wider market has slid from last year’s record highs.
“The interest in eugenioides now feels very similar to me to the interest in the geisha variety of the arabica species in the early 2000s,” said Kim Ionescu, chief strategy development officer at the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA), highlighting the scarcity and unique flavor that make it a luxury good.
Tricky to grow and sensitive to climate and other factors, eugenioides coffee plants have low productivity, Pereira Filho said. He said he expects each of his five hectares planted with the species to produce just two bags each, less than a tenth of the average yield for arabica.
“It needs a lot of care because this is a plant that has not undergone genetic improvement,” said Pereira Filho, who said he knows of just a couple other farms in the world looking to cultivate eugenioides commercially.
Reuters could not confirm the scale of global production for the species.
Pereira Filho has over two decades of experience producing specialty coffee in Brazil, the world’s top producer of arabica.
($1 = 5.25 Brazilian reais)
(Reporting by Oliver GriffinEditing by Brad Haynes and Nick Zieminski)
