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My first experience working as a barista was while I was living in Portugal with my mother. I was working part-time behind the bar in a busy coffee shop in Central Lisbon.
After I finished my studies, I decided to go back to Brazil and explore the opportunities there. I got a summer job at a cafe that was just starting to roast their coffee and that was my first venture into the specialty coffee world - understanding Brazil as a coffee-producing country, the processes, varieties etc.
Soon after, a friend of mine who moved to Dubai got me an offer as a head barista for a five-star hotel. I took up the offer and moved here in 2013, where the market was almost untouched with only one specialty coffee roaster then. I saw this as an opportunity to invest in my career by deeply studying coffee and understanding the whole supply chain.
In 2019, when the UAE market was already somewhat established, I decided that I wanted to have my voice on how I approach coffee, and that was how Três Marias Coffee Company was born.
Specialty coffee capsules are a new world to explore and because we (at Três Marias Coffee) strive to make specialty coffee accessible through innovation, accessibility and community; capsules as a product fit naturally with our core values as a brand.
The challenge with specialty coffee is to help people understand that coffee could have more flavours other than overpowering bitterness, and capsules are a great way to introduce that.
So I feel there is an opportunity here, and we wanted to lead the market towards it.
Last year, I officially became a certified Sensory Judge for the World Barista Championships. I have been working on this project for years, and I am very happy I finally got my certification.
This will allow me to travel more to different countries to judge their national barista championship. This month I am going to Turkey and Portugal, to meet the amazing team of professionals on the world stage and choose the best barista in the world.
This makes me proud.
Definitely. This year we started to feel the impact of climate change a lot more with the prices of coffee going up.
This is something that we, as coffee brands and coffee professionals, should communicate about. It is important to share about the supply chain and that prices raised are from the increase of green coffee pricing and not because roasters want to increase their profits.
That is a very good question. I think we have done so much in the past two and a half years, that we’re now working internally as a company to understand how to grow with better procedures as a team.
For coffee products, we have two new launches this year, one of which I believe will help Três Marias reach new heights. We are all super excited about it!
We see ourselves expanding to other countries as well, but we’ll move step by step.
We believe the Supernova line of coffee capsules is one of our most innovative product to date. The capsules is a convenient and consistent way to enjoy a high-quality specialty coffee from home or office and is also one of the products that pushed the boundaries in the specialty coffee scene. This allowed more consumers to be open to enjoy our specialty coffee at a lower barrier to entry instead of purchasing an espresso machine.
I usually wake up at 7.30am, change (my kid’s) diaper and make a cup of espresso coffee before heading to the office at 9am. That is also where the roastery team would conduct their morning routine of cupping their previous days roasts where I get to drink more coffees!
My first coffee gear is a Clever dripper from PPP Coffee and a Hario travel grinder. I also have a Chemex, Hario V60 and Rocket Giotto Type V espresso machine. My personal favourite is The Clever because it is easy-to-use and clean and very consistent.
I started in coffee about eight years ago, and started because of Da Matteo in Gothenburg. I was just a regular in their coffee shop and was doing some consultations regarding marketing and business development with a company I had together with the founder of da Matteo - Matts.
So I’m in coffee because of one person more than anything else and it's a person called Matts Johansson, who started Da Matteo. He was and is a huge inspiration for me today as well and if I didn’t meet him, I would never have ended up in coffee because he introduced me to everything to do with coffee.
I competed in coffee before I started working with coffee as well. I competed in a barista cup and that was very much because of him as well, because he allowed me to hang out in their lab to train.
I got into coffee because my idea at the time (which definitely has changed) was that coffee was very quality-focused, that it was very craft-focused, and authentic. I had an idea that people cared a lot about what was going on and how they can make stuff better. Not sure if I believe that today, but it doesn't really matter because I'm on a different path. That is basically the short story of it all.
It was the fact that at a point when I tasted Nespresso for the first time, many years ago, instead of saying “this tastes off”, “it’s not nice”, “I don't like this”, “It's not quality” etc. So most people kind of disregarded it as just something that Nespresso does. But whenever I taste coffee products I don't like, I get excited.
It's the same that we have this cold brew line but I don't like cold brew. So instead of saying, we're never going to make cold brew, we say how do we do a cold brew that April likes - likewise with the capsules. Generally, capsules didn’t taste good, they had extractions issues, and a lot of materials issues (where everything was plastic in the beginning).
Then we asked ourselves, “How do we do a tastier one?”. That was the only incentive. Business-wise, it didn't really make any sense back then. We pushed a bunch of money into trying to make a tasty version of a capsule and it’ll be years before we recover the money we invested into making the capsules the way that we do.
I looked at Nespresso, the same way I do at La Marzocco and you guys have understood that as well right? Because you guys are creating your own machine. What Nespresso did was to create a brewing system, right? They didn't create a capsule, they created a brewing system - a machine that you can brew some kind of coffee beverage with. To me, that was amazing, because now we have a platform and you creating another machine now, which I hope is better. But I think the format of a capsule is amazing, it's consistent, fast, and tasty (if you do it well).
I think the biggest struggle with selling coffee as a product if you’re talking about coffee beans, it's the fact that someone needs to brew it. You sell them a bag of espresso beans, they need to take it home, start up their machine, dial into the grinders and I would say 9 out of 10 times our coffee doesn't taste the way that it should because someone else has to brew it. Which is what makes it difficult. Whereas with a capsule, we can guarantee 100% of the time that our coffee will taste exactly like we intended it to taste. It's a fantastic product.
So I'm super excited and have been for years since we started this whole product and I feel we're getting on top of it. Not convinced still, being as small as we are, it's a hard product to push because it's really a volume product.
Yes, which you have to. We can’t go into too much specifics but the thing is for this brewing format, the temperatures and pressures are quite different from any other type of extraction. So, you can't really roast it the way you normally do, like how a lot of people take their espresso roast and put it into capsules.
Nespresso machines or your machine are not La Marzocco machines. It's not nine bar pressure, nor the same flow rate so it goes without saying that it's a different type of brewing and a different type of brewing requires a different kind of roasting. It's just like how we differentiate the espresso and filter roast where it doesn't make any sense to make one roast profile for both filter and espresso because you have a pressurised brewing method and an unpressurised brewing method with two vastly different flow rates. There's no way that the optimal version of a roast will be awesome for both. It might be good for both but if your goal is to make the best version of a coffee, having the same roast profile is just lazy.
I wake up at 5.30am every single day and after taking a shower I am out the door at 6am. What I like drinking now is actually tea, I am really into cold extractions with tea, so I take that with me in the morning and walk out the door to go for a walk for about 30 minutes - just walk without doing anything or listening to anything. It’s a great way to start your mind, I try not to think about anything. After that I go to the coffee store, usually there at around 7am and then have my first coffee at eight o’clock. Today my first coffee was a pourover made by Jo here at April, a Red Honey Processed Gesha from Volcan Azul.