It all started in 1967, when Isidro Pereira, Luiz Paulo's father, bought the farm. At that time, Luiz was still studying his degree in agriculture and livestock production. Five years later, father and son joined forces to manage the property together.
In 1974, at the will of Luiz Paulo, an expansion plan took place at Fazenda IP. More and more coffee seedlings were being planted as the farm area increased. Decades later, he bought his first pulping machine and began studying new methods of coffee processing and specialty coffee production.
To encourage quality and care in post-harvest processes, Luiz implemented a bonus payment policy to motivate all employees involved in the process. At the same time, he offers staff some guidance and explanations on the importance of each step in the harvesting process for the final quality of coffee. “The search for innovation in the specialty coffee business must be constant and mandatory,” says Luiz.
In the spirit of continuous improvement and pushing the boundaries of post-harvest processing to evolve with the specialty coffee communities' preferences while increasing Brazil's visibility as a producing origin of diverse flavor profiles and high quality crops, Luiz Paulo has established Santuario Sul, or Southern Sanctuary — touted as the birthplace of Carmo Coffees’ New Brazil Coffees, where new describes both the non-traditional cultivation, harvesting, and post-harvest processing practices espoused by Luiz Paulo and the unprecedented flavor profiles these are aimed at creating.
The impetus for founding this new specialty coffee project was the desire not only to anticipate, but shape, market trends. Its implementation began with bringing a diversity of coffee varieties from the different producing countries, acclimatizing them to the Brazilian environment, and then conducting experiments in fermentation and drying to give rise to a new spectrum of Brazilian cup profiles.
