Yuki Minami, Anaerobic Yeast Fermentation

Cerrado Mineiro in Minas Gerais is a high-altitude savannah best known as Brazil’s “carrot capital,” also producing garlic, onions, potatoes—and, since the 1970s, coffee. For decades, quality coffee from this region was bulked and sold as commodity. That began to change when a younger generation returned to explore specialty.

One of those farmers is Yuki Minami, who came back to her family’s Fazenda Santo Antonio to focus on quality improvements and better prices. She later added a second farm, Olhos D’Água, just down the road. In 2016, Yuki joined with neighboring producers—third-generation Japanese-Brazilian farmers including Edson Tamekuni and Michael Tomizawa—to form Aequitas Coffee, exporting their first lots with us in 2018.

Aequitas takes its name from the Roman goddess of equity, reflecting Yuki’s focus on justice, transparency, and fairness in trade. Her leadership has been instrumental not only in our ability to work in Brazil, but in creating a platform for her community to move into specialty.

At the farm level, she has invested in raised beds, post-harvest training, and new processing techniques. Ahead of the 2023 harvest, Yuki worked with post-harvest consultant Dr. Giselle Abreu to refine drying methods, trial yeast fermentations, and experiment with large-tank and layered drying approaches—early steps in an ongoing push for innovation.