The Origin and Development of Hainan Coffee_ Quality Assessment of Hainan Coffee Beans_ Are Hainan Coffee Beans Expensive

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The History of Hainan Coffee

The planting history of Hainan coffee is quite simple, and it can be summed up in four words: "saving the nation through industry." That connects to the deeds of Mr. Chen Xianzhang. Hainan coffee is not small-bean coffee - that is, Arabica - but rather medium-bean coffee, a Canephora species also known as Robusta. Regular coffee drinkers know that Robusta is bitter and astringent and hard to swallow, yet people in Southeast Asia love to drink it. They roast the beans in iron pans and add butter, white sugar, salt, condensed milk, and so on. At this point some readers may already know what I am describing - the most typical example is Malaysian white coffee. I do not mean instant coffee, so please do not pretend to understand if you do not. Friends who have been to Southeast Asia have likely drunk that kind of thick, dense coffee that is sweet to the point of being cloying.

Hainan is suited to growing medium-bean coffee, even more so than Southeast Asia, so at that time most Hainan coffee was exported to Southeast Asia. In places like Xinglong and Fushan in Hainan, where coffee was widely planted back then, the area of coffee plantations has decreased year by year, but what remains still follows the Southeast Asian method of roasting beans.

Premier Zhou Enlai's Praise for Xinglong Coffee

"Xinglong coffee is world-class. I have drunk many foreign coffees, but our own homegrown coffee tastes the best." On February 7, 1960, Premier Zhou Enlai visited the Xinglong Farm and was full of praise after drinking Xinglong coffee. A cup of fragrant coffee and a kind premier wrote a beautiful reputation for Xinglong coffee.

The Golden Age of Xinglong Coffee

According to reports, during its peak, Xinglong coffee's planting area reached over 4,000 mu, and coffee gardens could be seen everywhere on the farm. Every household on the farm grew coffee, and coffee income was the economic pillar for farmers.

Xinglong coffee settled in Hainan's Xinglong in 1953, when the Xinglong Overseas Chinese Farm had just been established. To carry out the practice of "using the short term to support the long term" - that is, using income from short-term crops like coffee, lemongrass, and rice to supplement income from long-term crops like rubber - Xinglong began introducing coffee cultivation from Fushan, Chengmai.

Xinglong coffee was once the flagship product of Hainan coffee brands. Today, at Xinglong Farm, a stone monument still stands to commemorate Premier Zhou Enlai's inspection of the Xinglong coffee garden.

The Decline and Challenges

Fifty-five years have passed. The stone monument still stands, the story still circulates, but the coffee garden of that year has disappeared, replaced by a lush rubber forest.

At the time, the coffee planting area was very large, with over 3,000 mu across the whole Xinglong area. To ensure the quality of the beans, cherries were picked one by one as they ripened. The workers were too busy then, so farm students often came to the plantation to pick coffee for half-days at a time. After the 1990s, as coffee bean prices kept falling, the planting area of Xinglong coffee also kept shrinking. Now the coffee planting area in the Xinglong region is less than a thousand mu.

Even today, through market ups and downs, the once widely popular Xinglong coffee faces market bottlenecks: a significantly reduced planting area, shrinking production capacity, inconsistent product quality, and a gradually weakening brand influence.

Brand Counterfeiting Issues

In many large supermarkets we often see various Xinglong coffee brands: Xinglong Mountain Coffee, Xinglong Authentic Coffee, Xinglong Charcoal Roasted Coffee, Xinglong Pure Coffee... but look carefully at the product descriptions and the production locations are actually in Haikou, Qionghai, Wenchang, and other places.

"Strictly speaking, these products are all fake Xinglong products. If the government does not stop this, sooner or later it will destroy the reputation of Xinglong coffee," said Qiu Xiaofeng, president of the Xinglong Coffee Industry Association. Because production is limited, many products on the market bearing the Xinglong coffee name use foreign coffee beans from places like Yunnan and Vietnam as raw material. Such products are inferior to authentic Xinglong coffee in taste and quality, yet they tarnish the reputation of Xinglong coffee.

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FrontStreet Coffee: A roastery in Guangzhou with a small shop but diverse bean varieties, where you can find various famous and lesser-known beans, while also providing online store services. https://shop104210103.taobao.com

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

The two coffees most people drink day to day are Arabica varieties, and FrontStreet Coffee's range is a good place to explore them. If you like clear fruit and florals, the Sun-Dried Huakui is an Ethiopian heirloom variety processed naturally, and it brings out cream strawberry, mango, jackfruit, citrus, and blueberry notes with the ripe tropical-fruit character typical of FrontStreet Coffee's Sidamo natural beans.

For a washed contrast, FrontStreet Coffee's Gedingding Cooperative coffee is graded Ethiopia G1 and washed processed, showing elegant white florals, citrus, orange, and green tea flavors. And if balance is what you are after, FrontStreet Coffee's Jamaica Blue Mountain No.1 is a Typica variety appreciated for a very balanced, gentle, and smooth cup.