Brazil is forecast to harvest a record 71.9 million 60-kg bags in 2026/27 — 47.5 million arabica and 24.4 million robusta — out of a world crop of 189.7 million. The USDA Foreign Agricultural Service puts that at “nearly 40 percent of world production”, and for arabica alone “typically supplying between 40 and 50 percent depending on the biennial crop production cycle”. Two facts explain most of what is distinctive about Brazilian coffee: the crop grows on plateaus flat enough to harvest by machine, and it alternates between heavy and light years across the whole country at once.
Brazil’s link to the American market is old, and this much of it is documented rather than retold: Arbuckle Bros., which Ukers in 1922 called “the world’s greatest coffee business”, kept green-coffee offices in Rio de Janeiro, Santos and Victoria, and its packaged brand Yuban is still sold in US supermarkets today.
Where the coffee actually comes from is concentrated: “over 70 percent of Arabica coffee is grown” in Minas Gerais, and “approximately 70 percent of Robusta coffee is grown” in Espírito Santo, both figures the FAS’s own. Everything below is from named documents, and where this page previously stated a number we could not find in one, we say so.
Table of Contents
Corrections to an earlier version of this page
The page contradicted itself about the arabica share, in the same article. The body said arabica beans “make up around 70% of Brazil’s total coffee production” and robusta “approximately 30%”. The FAQ block said arabica accounts for “around 80% of the total production”. Both cannot be right. Brazil’s national statistics agency IBGE put arabica at 66.1 per cent of Brazilian production in 2021-2022, as reported by Sera and colleagues in Scientific Reports; the FAS forecast for 2026/27 works out at 47.5 of 71.9 million bags, or 66 per cent. The 70/30 split was close; the 80 per cent figure was not, and the FAQ block that carried it has been removed along with the rest of the FAQ.
“Arabica coffee could become extinct by 2080” was attributed to the Climate Institute. The 2080 horizon and the extinction language come from a different study, and it is about a different thing. Davis, Gole, Baena and Moat modelled indigenous arabica in Ethiopia for PLoS ONE in 2012, and concluded that bioclimatic unsuitability “would place populations in peril, leading to severe stress and a high risk of extinction” — of wild populations, by 2080, in their models’ worst case of “an almost 100% reduction” in suitable localities. That is a conservation finding about coffee growing wild in forests, not a forecast that farmed arabica disappears. What the modelling does say about the farmed crop is covered, with sources, on our page about climate change and coffee farming.
“Brazil’s coffee exports reach over 40 million bags a year” was attributed to the International Coffee Organization with no link. On FAS numbers it is not an every-year figure: Brazilian coffee bean exports for 2025/26 were revised down 3.0 million bags to 34.0 million “due to lower shipments to the EU and United States”, and 45.0 million for 2026/27 would be a record rather than a norm.
Two economic figures could not be verified and are not repeated. The page said “over 8 million people in Brazil are employed either directly or indirectly through the coffee industry”, and that coffee contributes “about 1.2% to the nation’s GDP” according to the Confederation of Agriculture and Livestock of Brazil. Neither carried a link and we did not locate either figure in a document we could open. We are not saying they are wrong; we are saying a reader cannot check them, so they have no place on the page.
The regional flavour table is gone, and so are the tasting notes. “Sweet, fruity (MG)”, “Rich, intense (ES)”, “Varies from sweet, fruity to chocolaty”, plus a variety table assigning Yellow Bourbon “sweet, fruity, chocolatey” and Catuaí “sweet, citric acidity”. Nobody at this site has cupped any of them. The regional and varietal facts that are sourced are below.
The history section has been removed rather than rewritten. It carried a smuggled seed planted in Pará in the 1700s, an 1888 date, an immigration programme and a 1957 coffee institute, none of it linked to a source. We would rather run a shorter page than repeat unsourced history in the site’s voice. The page’s other historical claim, a 1975 frost that supposedly ended Paraná’s run as a coffee giant, is dealt with below.
The growing regions, from Brazilian production data
Mapping IBGE production data for 2021-2022, Sera and colleagues record very high arabica production (over 100,000 tonnes) in Minas Gerais, “especially in the regions of Sul de Minas Gerais, Cerrado Mineiro and Matas de Minas or Zona da Mata”; very high production in “northern and northeastern São Paulo, in the region called Mogiana”; very high arabica production in southern Espírito Santo near the Minas border; and high production (50,000 to 100,000 tonnes) in southern Bahia. For the other species, “C. canephora, which comprises the robusta and conilon varieties, is primarily cultivated in the North, Northeast, and coastal regions of Brazil. Robusta is predominantly grown in the state of Rondônia, whereas conilon is more commonly cultivated” in Espírito Santo.
Two details from the same paper are worth more than any flavour chart. Specialty coffee is a thin slice of all this: of the area harvested for coffee in Brazil in 2022, “only 38 thousand hectares were used for the production of certified specialty coffees”, roughly 82 per cent of it in Minas Gerais. And altitude, not state borders, does the work — Paraná’s coffee sits at around 700 m in the Norte Pioneiro, while Minas Gerais and the Mogiana are “located above 1000 m”.
On the 1975 frost the old page blamed for Paraná’s decline: we did not find a primary source for that event and are not asserting it. What is documented is that frost risk in Paraná is real and managed for — the same authors note that “an alternative practice that can reduce the risk of frost in places with higher latitudes, such as the state of Paraná, is the use of crop afforestation”, and that IBGE records no coffee at all in Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul, “which are known to be colder and have a greater frequency of severe frosts”.
Natural, pulped natural and washed — the processing Brazil is known for
Brazil’s signature is not a bean, it is a post-harvest method. In dry (natural) processing, “the harvested fruits are dried with the peel (exocarp) and pulp (mesocarp)”. Because Brazilian harvesting “tends to mix fruits at different stages of maturation”, natural lots can carry immature beans, which “tend to reduce beverage quality because they result in an astringent, bitter and/or vegetal flavor”.
Semidry processing was developed to solve exactly that. Sera and colleagues describe it as “also called natural pulped and pulped cherry or CD in Brazil”, an “intermediate system between dry and wet processing systems”: after the dry method’s first steps, “the fruit is peeled by a machine, removing part of the pulp”. Ripe fruit skins come off mechanically and unripe fruit does not, so the two maturities separate themselves. The result, in the paper’s words, is that “pulped natural coffees have become trusted by the consumer market as high-quality coffees that are free of the characteristics derived from immature beans and have a fuller-bodied beverage than coffees processed using other methods”. Adoption is wide: “approximately 60 to 80% of coffee farmers in Brazil” use it, and among the 175 specialty farms surveyed, semidry was the most common method, alone or combined with others.
Fully washed processing, by contrast, “is usually used in coffee-growing regions of Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico, El Salvador and Kenya”. Brazil is the reason “pulped natural” is a category at all.
Why machines, and why every other year
The FAS is explicit about the link between terrain and mechanisation: arabica in Brazil is “cultivated on elevated plateaus and rolling hills with relatively uniform weather patterns, rather than mountainous microclimates that are typical of other producing countries”, and “Brazil’s geography also supports mechanized pruning and harvesting, further harmonizing output”. Variety breeding pushes the same way — World Coffee Research describes Mundo Novo, a natural Bourbon-Typica cross found in São Paulo state and selected from 1943, as having “very high vegetative vigor, excellent response to pruning, and suitable for mechanical harvesting”. Catuaí, a cross of Mundo Novo with Caturra made by the Instituto Agronômico at Campinas, is short enough that it “can be planted at nearly double the density”. Caturra itself is Brazilian in origin: a natural dwarfing mutation of Bourbon “discovered on a plantation in the state of Minas Gerais in Brazil sometime between 1915 and 1918”.
Uniform terrain also means uniform shocks. Arabica trees “naturally alternate between high-yielding on-years and lower-yielding off-years as energy shifts between fruit and vegetative growth”, and in Brazil a frost, heat wave or drought “synchronize yields across large areas by forcing trees into an off-year”. The FAS puts the size of the swing at 5 to 10 million bags, and says those swings “account for most of the year-to-year variation in global Arabica production”.
The 2021 frost, and the five years that followed
The FAS narrative for the last half-decade is worth reading in its own words, because it is the clearest account of what recent Brazilian harvests have actually done. Arabica yields “have been inconsistent since 2021/22, when drought and high temperatures reduced off-year output by 13.3 million bags. The subsequent on-year witnessed only a modest rebound of 3.4 million bags due to severe frost, high temperatures, and below-average rainfall. Production increased again in 2023/24 but yields lagged expectations because of excessive rainfall during fruit development. These gains were followed by 2 consecutive years of declines as drought and heat again lowered yields.”
The consequence was global. Ethiopia, Mexico and Peru raised output to fill the gap, but “these gains did not fully compensate for Brazil’s losses”, and world ending stocks fell 15.5 million bags between 2020/21 and 2024/25. The 2026/27 rebound to 47.5 million bags of arabica would be the second-largest crop on record. For what a warming climate does to that picture over decades rather than seasons, see our page on climate change and coffee farming; for the species themselves, arabica and robusta have pages of their own, and Brazil in the wider continental context sits on our South American coffee overview.
Sources
- USDA Foreign Agricultural Service, Coffee: World Markets and Trade, July 2026 — production, export and biennial-cycle figures and all quoted FAS wording.
- Sera, Volsi, Mariucci Júnior, Pereira and Telles, “Production and trade of specialty coffee in Brazil”, Scientific Reports 15 (2025) — IBGE production mapping, processing method descriptions, specialty area figures.
- World Coffee Research variety catalogue entries for Mundo Novo, Catuaí and Caturra.
- Davis, Gole, Baena and Moat, “The Impact of Climate Change on Indigenous Arabica Coffee (Coffea arabica): Predicting Future Trends and Identifying Priorities”, PLoS ONE 7(11): e47981 (2012), doi 10.1371/journal.pone.0047981 — full text read via Europe PMC, record PMC3492365.
