How Do You Brew Yellow Bourbon Coffee From Brazil?

Brazil Yellow Bourbon coffee, grown at high altitude and given a medium-dark roast, brews into a classic Brazilian cup: nuts, dark chocolate, and caramel with a creamy, rounded body. A pour-over setup with a filter cup, adjusted grind size, controlled water temperature, and a three-pour technique brings out that sweetness and balance.

The Bourbon variety traces back to Bourbon Island, now Réunion, where the French planted round beans from Yemen in the eighteenth century. Brazil brought round Bourbon home in 1860, and it spread across Central and South America as the oldest mother variety in Latin America. Its fruit is small and round, and the beans are relatively dense, a trait linked to sweetness at altitude.

Brazilian coffee has always been known for its balanced and full-bodied character, while the Yellow Bourbon variety can reveal a more delicate sweetness when grown at high altitudes. Today, Front Street Coffee takes you on an in-depth look at the Yellow Bourbon coffee beans from Brazil's Queen's Farm, from the variety's origins to its processing methods, and then to the pour-over extraction details after a medium-dark roast. We will share filter cup selection, grind size adjustment, water temperature control, and the three-pour technique to help you brew the classic Brazilian flavor woven with nuts, dark chocolate, and caramel, and to experience a creamy, smooth, and rounded mouthfeel.

For more specialty coffee knowledge, please follow our WeChat official account: Front Street Coffee (FrontStreet Coffee)

When people think of Brazil, most may picture football, but as coffee lovers, Front Street first associates it with coffee beans. Brazilian coffee is a classic representative of full-bodied flavor and has won widespread praise for its outstanding balance. Today, Front Street will talk about how to brew an authentic "Brazilian flavor."

Brazilian Yellow Bourbon Variety

After reviewing the materials, Front Street learned that the foundation of the world's Arabica coffee varieties mainly consists of Typica and Bourbon, as well as their descendants. Bourbon and its derived varieties are widely planted in Central and South America, and in many countries they are still the main cultivated varieties, such as excellent varieties like Caturra.

The name Bourbon comes from Bourbon Island, which is today's Réunion Island off the east coast of Africa. In the seventeenth century, the island was a French possession and was called Bourbon Island until it was renamed at the end of the eighteenth century. In the eighteenth century, the French introduced round coffee beans from Yemen to Bourbon Island and began cultivating them. In 1860, Brazil brought round Bourbon back home for cultivation, and it gradually spread to various countries in Central and South America, becoming the oldest mother variety of coffee in Latin America.

The fruit of the Bourbon variety is small and round, and the coffee beans are relatively dense. Bourbon grown at high altitudes has outstanding sweetness and bright acidity. Like Typica, it is an old and excellent variety, but Bourbon has stronger resistance to coffee leaf rust than Typica, and its flavor is by no means inferior. The biggest thing the two share is that they must rely on shade trees to block sunlight in order to grow smoothly and develop good flavor, so they have certain requirements for the growing environment.

For common Bourbon fruit, from flowering to ripening, the color changes from green to slightly yellow, then to red, and finally to deep red, which is why it is called Red Bourbon. There are also varieties that do not turn red when ripe but instead become a rare yellow or pink, namely Yellow Bourbon and Pink Bourbon. Yellow Bourbon produced at high altitudes has a delicate flavor and once won consecutive excellent rankings in Brazil's Cup of Excellence competition. Front Street's Queen's Farm coffee uses exactly Yellow Bourbon coffee, produced in Brazil's Mogiana region.

Brazilian Queen's Farm Coffee

Traditionally, Brazilian coffee-producing regions that prioritize mass production are mostly distributed in flat areas at relatively low altitudes, so the coffee flavor is milder and lacks a standout personality. Queen's Farm (Fazenda Rainha) is a rare high-altitude farm in the area. The ideal hilly terrain, combined with just the right climatic conditions, gives the Yellow Bourbon coffee produced here a rich pectin layer and a more prominent sweetness.

The traditional natural method is to pour the coffee cherries directly onto concrete ground and sun-dry them until dry. This rough processing easily gives the coffee earthy and other off-flavors as well as an unpleasant over-fermented note. Queen's Farm pours the cherries into a water tank before drying and uses flotation to remove underripe fruit. To avoid earthy and fermented flavors, Queen's Farm spreads the coffee cherries on African raised beds throughout the entire process and arranges for workers to turn them at regular intervals to reduce uneven heating and preserve the coffee's cleanliness as much as possible.

Queen's Farm Coffee Pour-Over Reference

Front Street wants to highlight Queen's Farm's classic regional flavor, that is, its rich chocolate aroma, so Front Street uses a medium-dark roast. After cupping, Front Street tasted a very obvious sweetness in this Queen's Farm coffee, so for brewing we use a three-pour method, hoping to present more layers in the coffee.

Coffee beans enter their best tasting period 4 to 7 days after roasting. Beyond that time (about a month and a half after roasting), the aroma may already have faded and some woody notes may develop. To avoid this situation, Front Street has mentioned in many articles that the most important thing is that Front Street only ships coffee beans freshly roasted within 5 days, so everyone can taste coffee with excellent flavor.

Filter cup: Medium-dark roasted coffee beans mainly present a full-bodied and rounded mouthfeel. For this characteristic, Front Street chooses the slower-flow KONO filter cup for extraction. The upper part of the KONO is a smooth curved surface, and the lower part has guide ribs one-third of its length. This allows the filter paper to fit the filter cup more closely, restricts airflow from going upward, and lets hot water only flow downward, creating a siphon-like extraction effect and allowing the coffee powder's aromatic substances to be released more fully.

Grind size: Considering the darker roast, the texture of the coffee beans becomes looser. After grinding into powder, it easily absorbs more water and releases more soluble substances, which can bring out unpleasant bitterness and miscellaneous flavors such as wood. Front Street Coffee (FrontStreet Coffee) baristas will adjust the grind coarser so that the coffee particles are larger, reducing the risk of over-extraction. Here, use a medium grind (70-75% passing through a Chinese standard No. 20 sieve).

Water temperature: When brewing light-to-medium roasted coffee beans, Front Street uses a higher water temperature to release the aromatic substances from high-density coffee beans. But for medium-dark roasted Brazilian coffee, because it has undergone a longer caramelization reaction, if the same high-temperature hot water is used, the coffee easily becomes strong and has a burnt, bitter taste. Appropriately lowering the water temperature can help us reduce a certain amount of bitterness. Front Street will use a water temperature of 87-88°C.

Coffee powder will absorb about twice its own weight in water. Front Street generally uses 15 grams of coffee powder and extracts at a 1:15 coffee-to-water ratio, finally obtaining close to 200 ml of coffee liquid, which is 1-2 servings.

Filter cup: KONO filter cup

Water temperature: 87-88°C

Dose: 15 grams

Coffee-to-water ratio: 1:15

Grind size: Medium grind (70% passing through a Chinese standard No. 20 sieve)

Use twice the coffee powder's weight in water to wet the coffee bed, forming a dome and blooming for 30s, then pour in a thin stream in circles from the inside outward until 125g, then pause. When the coffee bed drops to half the height of the filter cup, continue pouring the third stage with the same thin stream until 225g, until all the coffee liquid has filtered through. Remove the filter cup. The time is about 2 minutes.

The pour-over Brazilian Queen's Farm coffee smells of lemon, nuts, and peanuts. On the palate, it has a very rich aroma of nuts, dark chocolate, and caramel, with obvious sweetness and a mouthfeel as smooth as cream, overall quite rounded.

The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.