Brazil’s coffee story is traced to 1727, when Francisco de Melo Palheta, sent to arbitrate a border dispute in French Guiana, left with seeds hidden in a bouquet from the governor’s wife. Brazil now grows about a third of the world’s coffee, over 2.7 million tons in 2011, mostly in Minas Gerais, São Paulo, and Espírito Santo, where altitude and a distinct wet and dry season suit the plant. The first boom, from the 1830s to the 1850s, supplied factory workers in Europe and the United States, and by the 1840s Brazil held 40 percent of the world market, built on 1.5 million enslaved Africans imported in the first half of the century.

After the foreign slave trade was outlawed in 1850 and slavery abolished in 1888, the colonato system paid immigrant families from Italy, Spain, and Japan a piece rate on thousands of assigned trees while plantation stores kept them in debt. Coffee money built railways and turned São Paulo from about 30,000 people in the 1850s into a metropolis of a million by the 1930s, while São Paulo and Minas Gerais elites ran café com leite politics. The 1906 Taubaté agreement used foreign loans from bankers like the Rothschilds to buy and stockpile surplus beans, encouraging more planting until Brazil supplied 80 percent of the world’s coffee in the 1920s, and after the 1929 crash millions of bags were burned.

• The São Paulo Railway hauled cars up the coastal mountains with cables and stationary steam engines.
• The black frost of July 18, 1975, killed over half a billion trees and doubled world coffee prices within a year.
• Brazil’s refusal to lower its quotas helped end the International Coffee Agreement in 1989, and the Brazilian Coffee Institute was abolished.
• Nearly all Brazilian coffee is dry processed, with whole cherries sun dried on patios for three to four weeks.
• Coffee fell from nearly 64 percent of exports in 1950 to about 2.5 percent, and Brazil passed the United States in consumption in the mid 2010s.