## 1 Introduction  
Coffee is a tropical crop grown in more than 50 countries, with the largest producers being Brazil, Vietnam, Colombia, Indonesia, Ethiopia, and Honduras [1]. To produce coffee beans suitable for transportation and roasting, it is necessary to separate the seeds from the outer layers (skin, pulp, nucialge, and parchment). This process can be carried out by three different methods, namely dry, semi-dry, or wet processing, which reduces the moisture of the coffee beans from 65% to 12% [2]. In the dry processing, intact coffee fruits are exposed to the sun for approximately 30 days until they reach 12% moisture. Then the fruits are mechanically crushed to separate the beans from the outer layers. Wet processing is relatively more complex, as the fruits are mechanically depuplped and placed in tanks containing large volumes of water for a natural fermentation to occur for 24 to 48 h. The fermentation process removes the nucialge layer adhered to the seeds, which are finally sun-dried to reach the desired moisture content. Finally, semi-dry processing presents stages of both dry and wet methods, where the coffee fruits are mechanically depulped and then submitted to sun-drying [3].  
Recent studies using next-generation sequencing (NGS) have shown that more than 100 microbial genera are involved in coffee beans fermentation from Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, Honduras, and Australia [4; 5; 6; 7; 8; 9; 10]. However, temporal analyses of the fermentations revealed that the core microbiome is distinguished in three stages; (i) Enterobacteriaceaeaceae, acetic acid bacteria (AAB), and lactic acid bacteria (LAB) are present in higher frequencies at the beginning of the fermentation, (ii) LAB (mainly _Leuconostoc_, _Lactococcus_ or _Lactobacillus_) dominate the fermentation after 6 h and (iii) acid-tolerant LAB remains until the end of the process. Among the eukaryotic community, generally, yeasts belonging to the genus _Pichia_ show a high prevalence throughout fermentation [6; 7; 11; 12].  
The success of coffee fermentation depends on the indigenous microbiota associated with coffee farm microbiome. Recently, the use of starter cultures has been indicted to replace this empirical process, making coffee fermentation more predictable and controlled [11; 12]. One limitation in the use of starter cultures is that fermentations are usually carried out in open tanks, which can favor contamination by the natural microbiota. Due to this lack of control, the starters must establish dominance over the high load of indigenous microorganisms. In recent years, several studies have shown that yeast and LAB species (e.g., _Lactobacillus plantarum_, _Leuconostoc mesenteroides_, _Pichia kluyveri_, _Pichia anomala_, _Pichia fermentans_, _Hansenispora uavarum_, _Saccharomyces cerevisiae_, _Debaryomyces hansenii_, and _Torulaspora delbrueckii_, _Candida railenensis_) were able to suppress the indigenous microbiota during coffee fermentation, as well as produce coffee beverages with desired characteristics [13; 14; 15; 16; 17]. However, the existence of a connection between coffee farm microbiome and the resulting starter culture-added, coffee fermentation has not yet been investigated.  
It was recently demonstrated that co-inoculation of _Pichia fermentans_ YC5.2 and _Peliococcus acidilactici_ LPBC161 increases the production of metabolites (lactic acid, ethanol, and ethyl acetate) during coffee fermentation, evidencing a positive interaction between these two microbial groups [18]. In this sense, this study aimed to use a next-generation sequencing (NGS) to evaluate the influence of the microbial communities from coffee farm processing and coffee fermentation using _P. fermentans_ YC5.2 and _P. acidilactici_ LPBC161. In addition, the metabolite changes that occurred during the fermentation process were studied by chromatographic techniques.