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The Brazilian Highlands are at their picture postcard best. Blue-green mountains stretch to the horizon, glossy black vultures wheel in the winter sky and dusty red tracks undulate through some of the richest farmland in South America.
It's hard to believe this tranquil scene is the epicentre of a global coffee crisis which has sent the cost of your morning brew skyrocketing to a record high in the last two years - and will keep it there until at least the end of 2026.
Some industry analysts now believe we are entering the era of the £5 latte as standard on British high streets, not just for an expensive blend in a speciality coffee shop.
Speaking to The Mail on Sunday while inspecting his coffee fields in Brazil, coffee magnate Giuseppe Lavazza acknowledged that a 'perfect storm' of climate challenges and political pressures was impacting the 98 million cups drunk daily in the UK.
He added there would need to be a bumper crop of Robusta coffee beans in Vietnam this November, as well as a huge harvest of Arabica beans in Brazil next year, before there'd be any relief for Britain's beleaguered consumers.
'This has been a time of unparalleled, unprecedented stress in our industry, a real tempest which is not over yet for consumers or for us,' admitted the president of the Lavazza coffee company.
'And there is still a way to go before everyone can breathe out. We will have to wait at least another year, until the harvest in Brazil in June 2026, before we can be confident prices will start to come down again.
'The coffee bushes in these fields are in great shape, they're healthy, with a lot of buds ready for flowering, it's very reassuring. But price pressures, which seemed to be easing, have instead intensified - driven not by market dynamics, but by political choices.'
Mr Lavazza was referring to the 50pc trade tariff slapped on Brazilian coffee by US President Donald Trump last month.
The White House's action has further convulsed an industry already beset by adverse weather in its two main producing countries, Brazil and Vietnam; forthcoming EU environmental legislation; a rising terror threat and market manipulation by Wall Street traders which has kept prices artificially high.
From the start of 2023 to the end of 2024, the price of Arabica coffee beans rocketed by 190 per cent, while Robusta beans rose by 263 per cent.
In February this year, Arabica hit an all-time high of more than £3 per pound. For comparison, the pre pandemic price was around 80p per pound.
A decade ago, this would not have impacted the UK so severely. But Britain is shedding its historic fondness for tea with younger generations buying into coffee culture, keen to embrace its health benefits and fashionable image.
Indeed, coffee and tea were neck and neck in a YouGov poll published in June, which reported 41pc of the country enjoying a daily cuppa while 40pc reached for an espresso, a cappuccino or an Americano instead.
And there are signs the market can take no more. Despite big-ticket campaigns such as Lavazza's viral skit on the American version of The Office starring the show's iconic duo Steve Carell and John Krasinski, consumption is falling in the face of price hikes at the till.
(The Turin-based coffee roasting house has long enjoyed A-list endorsements from Hollywood stars including Julia Roberts, Jennifer Lopez and Ariana Grande, and also current tennis world Number One Jannik Sinner.)
Coffee drinking, which usually grows by 1-2pc annually, fell by 3.5pc last year, revealed Mr Lavazza. 'Coffee consumption has showed a lot of elasticity in the face of rising prices but after a certain point people just can't afford it,' he said.
But if there's a chill at the till in the UK, over in Minas Gerais it's still business as usual for the pickers, the producers and the coffee tasters who make five perfect cups of coffee from every single one tonne bag of beans, before they allow it to be released for export to Europe.
In the fields above coffee farm Fazenda Sao Jose, near the lively coffee town of Guaxupe, expert picker Sueli Vilhena, 54, is hard at work in the romantically named Field of the New Forest.
She's using a mechanical device called 'Little Hands' which gently shakes the precious beans off the bushes. 'In Brazil, we say that if you don't drink coffee, you're just not a good person,' she grins.
Her boss, Flavia Barbosa is the third generation of her family to farm coffee at Fazenda Sao Jose. As she works, the winter sun catches the gold coffee beans in her pierced ears and the one hanging on a chain around her neck.
'You marry a coffee plantation,' she says. 'Coffee bushes last 20 years, and take three years before they produce anything at all so it's what you might call a long-term relationship!'
It's the same story at the smaller, more remote and less glamorous Fazenda Mumbuca where farmer Talis, along with his primary school teacher wife Suiane, has produced 350 bags of coffee this year.
'I have never seen such peaks in the price of coffee,' he says as the couple's five-year-old twin daughters Marie-Lisa and Maria Luisa play with newly-harvested beans. 'Never in my life. It might bring new people in to the business but they're not like us, they come without the history and tradition which makes our coffee a proud family affair.'
Sadly, their passion and commitment can do little - for now - to assuage a coffee catastrophe which long predates the new Trump tariffs. So what are the root causes of this crisis?
First there's climate change which has damaged yields in Brazil, the world's biggest coffee producer, accounting for 38pc of the world's output. The weather has recently veered away from the perfect coffee growing conditions enjoyed since production began here at the start of the 19th century.
A devastating frost in 2021 was followed by another cold snap in 2024, while wet and dry seasons have seen both too much rain and too little.
Secondly, the coffee industry is facing the imposition of complex and controversial EU 'green' legislation which will outlaw the import of commodities grown on newly deforested land.
(Minas Gerais, Brazil's Rural Environmental Registry suggests, is already well ahead of these new rules, but they are making all coffee producing countries anxious.)
Thirdly, logistics crises in global trade - anything which disrupts the passage of coffee through pinch points such as the Suez Canal and the Malacca Straits - leads to higher costs and delivery delays in coffee's long and notoriously fragile supply chain.
For example, coffee prices spiked in 2021 when the vast container ship Ever Given got wedged in the Suez canal, blocking the passage of coffee to Europe from southeast Asia where Vietnam is the world's second biggest producer.
These multiple vulnerabilities mean Wall Street high rollers can easily manipulate coffee futures for profit.
Lavazza estimates that 75 per cent of international coffee trading is speculative, rather than being driven by the real demands of producers and roasters.
(Coffee traders don't physically possess the coffee they've bought - they just buy and sell it to make profits for clients such as investment funds or banks. It puts the cost of coffee in the hands of people outside the coffee industry and uncouples it from physical factors such as crop size and climate change.)
Nonetheless, at Fazenda Sao Jose, Giuseppe Lavazza is looking ahead to the day cheaper and more plentiful beans make their way from these bushes to Britain's baristas.
The first indicator of an end to the crisis would a healthy Robusta harvest Vietnam in two months' time. 'It's going to be a big, big moment for our industry,' he says with some understatement.
It's 130 years since Luigi Lavazza founded the family brand when he first blended coffee at his small grocery store in Turin; and it's 90 since he boarded the SS Conte Biancamano to sail from Italy to Brazil to walk in the coffee fields, just as his great grandson is now doing.
'Coming back to the origin is like turning back time,' says Giuseppe Lavazza, who helms what is today a £3 billion company.
Coffee, he says, has been his 'destiny' since he was an economics student having an essay crisis and pulling an all nighter at university.
'My big old silver Italian coffee pot was a good companion,' he says nostalgically. 'I'd have six cups and then fall asleep on my books.'
How he must long for those days before the climate change, man-made crises and now President Trump managed to brew up such storm for caffeine fans.