This is how we make the moonshine.
Talk about a long damn trip.
Traveling from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia to Sao Paulo, Brazil, to
evade the law.
Outlaws. Shiner Josh is on a mission to create a backwoods coffee moonshine to
cash in on a booming market for caffeinated spirits.
We made it out of the United States.
My buddy Chris got me out of town.
Henry told me the law was looking for me even more so.
Me staying in the woods at home was pointless.
He's got a guy down here named Paolo, and I'm supposed to be meeting.
He's supposed to have some motorcycles lined up, and we're supposed to go from
coffee farm to coffee farm.
I'm here in Brazil because me and my friend Chris are developing a coffee
infused moonshine that's going to take the world by storm.
There's a huge market out there for coffee infused liquor.
I'm going to make the backwoods version of that in my neck of the woods.
The number one illegal seller is coffee moonshine.
I think it's important for a moonshiner to be able to adapt.
There's a market for a moonshiner to get in to make some money.
Hell, I'm down.
I'm looking for Paulo.
He's supposed to be around here somewhere. Brazil is the best country
for my mission because they've got the best coffee in the world.
There he is right there, Paulo.
Once I find the right bean, then we're going to start developing the coffee
infused moonshine. Up, man.
I finally made it, bro.
Ha! What's up, man?
Nice to meet you, man.
Yeah, nice to meet.
You, too. You have your gear with you?
Oh, yeah, I'm good. Good.
See the bikes I got for us?
Yeah. Come on.
Hell, yeah. Well, we got here, man.
Yeah. To 900.
Yeah. So are we going to be sometimes on a highway and some dirt roads and
places to camp? Cool, man.
Have you been to Brazil?
No, sir.
No. This is the first time.
First time I've ever been over the pond, you know.
That's nice, huh?
We're going to have some coffee now, and I'm going to show you a map of the
area, and we're going to plot our trip around.
Okay. You're looking for coffee?
We got coffee here.
My first impression of Paolo.
Super awesome. He's laid back, and he's got some really damn bad ass
motorcycles. You ready?
Yeah, I'm ready.
Paolo's wanting to go get a cup of coffee and look at the map and go over
our plan. So now it's time for us to get on the bikes and roll.
You see, the environment is pretty different than a drama.
Yeah, the trees are smaller.
Yeah, and it's very dry.
And all you see around is coffee farm.
This is crazy.
There's coffee everywhere.
Yeah, coffee here.
Coffee there. Coffee there.
This just starting.
Again. The coffee production here.
You see, they are baby trees, but they're not.
They were cut to let it grow again.
And we're not going to see any rain for days here.
Maybe for a month.
And the road here is pretty hard, isn't it?
Hell, yeah, it's hard.
It's going to get harder.
I think Paolo's trying to scare me or something because he keeps talking about
how it's just going to get tougher and tougher.
They'll all like it rough.
It's really close now.
But what he don't know about me is the tougher the terrain is, the more I'm
going to lock it. Hello?
Hello.
How are you?
I'm fine.
Hi, Joe. Pleasure to meet you.
Pleasure. Thank you, man.
How are you?
This is Ramsey.
What's up, man? Nice to meet you, sir.
If you want to find the best coffee, you have to know.
Fabiola, this is real coffee farm.
This is the real thing, man.
Well, I'm glad to be here.
She's the fifth generation of coffee planters, and I knew that she was the
person to me.
So does she say welcome?
Thank you for having us.
Okay. Our bosses want to see a plant that's on to handle this Camino.
We go down the road and up the hills there, and Leandro, her employee, is
going to teach us how to pick, and he's going to show everything around for us.
Can we go now? Board.
Let's go, man. Thank you, guys.
Nice to meet you.
This is coffee. This is a yellow species.
So they're all just loaded like that?
Yeah. How does that. How do the branches not break?
That's nature.
You know what? It's amazing to me how much it changes from.
From right here.
Yeah. The beans, right?
Yeah.
Like it's all very white.
And then you dry them and you roast them.
Amazing how the flavor comes out of them.
After that. They don't.
You can't even tell the difference.
I mean, not at all.
Coffee is a major thing in Minas Gerais.
Oh.
Hey, man. How you doing, sir?
His name is Leandro.
Leandro.
Let's get some equipment here.
We have very specialized producers, little farms with families that produce
their own coffee for generations.
And this is where tradition becomes perfection.
Put the sifter under the branch we're going to pick.
And if we're going to pick only the cherries, we choose one by one.
Okay?
Okay. You can do that.
Yeah. Find the very red ones.
It's the darkest red ones.
Yeah. If you're going to pick all of them, just go like this.
You strip it. Yeah.
These people are living on the farm.
They're growing coffee.
They're harvesting coffee.
That's a lot like an old school Moonshine operations run.
Can you imagine doing that all day long?
Oh, yeah. These workers, they do their job and they take a lot of pride in what
they do. So they're. How are you doing?
Hell yeah. I think it's beautiful haha.
So they fall to the front.
Throw it to the front and jerk it back.
Leandro really makes it easy to separate the lead from the coffee beans.
He's got this sifter and Leandro just does like this and the leaves just go
away. Just as pretty as you please.
So I need to go this way.
Okay. You like that?
That's hard. I mean, you do it like this.
It takes a little bit of practice to learn how to do that.
Leandro is definitely a professional.
Oh, yeah? So you handpicked coffee man.
Came a long way to do it till I told you I was going to bring you to the
right place.
This is awesome, man. The beans from this region in Brazil are known for
having a slightly acidic, really full, smooth body flavor profile.
And that's exactly what I'm looking for to make the best tasting moonshine.
Tell him I said no being left behind.
No being left behind.
These beans are known to be some of the best beans in the world.
I can make a recipe that's going to take the backwoods by storm smell.
It means that the quality is good.
She wants these coffee beans in this giant pile spread out to where they're
like one or two, three beans tall so the sun can hit them all and dry them
all out.
You will only know if it's really good when you drink the coffee, but this is a
sign of good quality.
So when they come here, the beans, they are still very wet.
Yeah.
And if you keep them like that, they ferment.
So you want to dry them until this 11% of humidity.
Then they are ready and you do this like combing.
I understand that. Are these already roasted?
What makes them black?
The skin becomes dark when it starts to dry here, so the humidity is going down
and as it happens, it gets darker.
There are several steps in the dry in these beans, but after they're dried in
the sun, it's time to be roasted.
Okay. Now we're going to see how they roasted.
Huh?
How do you control whether it's a light roast, a medium roast or dark roast?
Looking at the color and smelling it.
So she she's looking at the time, but not the controls.
Pascal. Yeah, le look at that.
That's amazing.
By roasting the beans, it brings out a lot of flavors.
It also locks a lot of flavors in the amount of heat and the length of time
that you roasted coffee beans drastically changes the flavor profile
of the coffee.
Go. Thank you, Fabiola.
Thank you so much.
That's amazing.
Amazing.
Fabiola brought us out of a bag of her best coffee.
I can't wait to try it.
I'm hoping that this is a wrap bean for my coffee infused moonshine, But right
now we're worn out, and it's time for us to go find a camping spot.
Fine. Well, Biaggi.
Nice to.
Meet you.
Thank you, ma'am.
Bye bye.
Now we rest.
I'm excited to try Fabio's coffee tomorrow morning because I've came a
long way to come down here to find the perfect coffee bean.
When I taste it, I don't know immediately if it's the right thing to
mix with alcohol for the coffee moonshine that I'm developing, my friend
Chris. What an epic day, though.
Yeah.