Thailand Doi Saket

Flavor Notes: Clementine, Thai Iced Tea, Graham Cracker

You can tell from the outset that Beanspire was facing an uphill battle from their own words below, but they were and are still producing mighty fine coffee. Similar to our friends at Cedro Alto who bring us our Colombia coffees, Beanspire is a Thai-only collective working hands-on with farmers to develop and facilitate their access to the international specialty markets. At Mostra, rather than focusing on making sure we can self-aggrandize by specifying a type of trade or certification, we always look towards where the biggest difference can be made by the best coffee we can buy.

Doi Saket is the oldest coffee growing area in Thailand, located in Chiang Mai province. Back in the late 1970's, the first Arabica trees that were part of the opium replacement program of the Thai King were tested here, and have never been replaced by higher-yield cultivars like in many other regions. As a result, heirloom varieties, particularly Typica, are still commonplace in many old farms. The coffee trees are 30-40 years old, older than the farmers! We want to demonstrate to the farmers that there are people who appreciate and are willing to pay more for the heirloom cultivar to compensate for the lower yield. Typica is now rare as farmers replaced it with higher yield and more rust resistant strands.

This is an experimental lot from Doi Saket in Chiang Mai that Beanspire worked with Nui Intakad & Aoy Jaisooksern, a young couple, who had quit their white collar jobs in the city to come back to their parents' coffee farm 7 years ago. Nui is 36 and is an engineer by training, while Aoy is 33 and is an accountant by training. In this lot, we explore the possibility of creating clean and more complex coffee.

For this lot, we held the coffee cherries in a closed tank for 3 days, before taking them out to pulp. Then we put the coffee back into the closed tank and fermented the coffee further for an additional 72 hours under anaerobic environment, before taking the coffee out to dry on raised beds immediately. This is different from the fully washed process where the coffee is washed and soaked in water before drying. But the Double Anaerobic Honey process means that we dried the coffee with the mucilage intact without washing or soaking the coffee. After it is dried to the right moisture content, it is delivered to the dry mill for hulling and sorting. In terms of green preparation, the coffee went through a destoner, huller, size grader, density table and ended with handsorting.