2018 Thailand Coffee Bean Recommendations_ Introduction to Doi Tung Cloud Mist Coffee Flavor Profile_ How to Enjoy Northern Thai Coffee

2018 Thailand Travel Souvenirs: Premium Coffee Beans

If you are hunting for a souvenir to bring home from a 2018 trip to Thailand, Thai coffee beans are a superb choice: refined, memorable, and far more satisfying than the usual trinkets. Every lot is sorted by hand and given an artisan custom roast, and the raw material is estate-grade G1 Arabica roasted to a light-to-medium level.

Mae Salong Cloud Mist Thai Coffee Beans

High in the Tama Thao mountains of Mae Salong, at around 1,300 meters, the coffee grows wrapped in morning cloud and mist the whole year round. When the sun climbs and the fog lifts, the Arabica trees - including rare, precious golden Arabica - are nourished by the alternating gifts of dew, mist, sunlight, and starlight. Fed by trace-element-rich brown soil, they breathe and grow, developing the rich, multi-layered character of cloud-mist coffee and an aftertaste that lingers long after the cup is empty.

That singular natural setting has already made Mae Salong the largest and finest coffee-producing area in Thailand. In the country's annual coffee competitions, the championship consistently goes to Mae Salong.

Description

The cool mountain climate of northern Thailand, generous rainfall, and terrain sitting at 1,300 meters produce remarkable, high-quality Arabica beans with a jewel-bright coffee aroma. For more than a decade these coffees have collected major awards, and northern Thai coffee has become an internationally recognized mark of quality.

Recently we began exclusively representing top estate beans from the Chiang Rai region of northern Thailand, buying fair-trade lots directly from the estates. Cutting out the middlemen means farmers keep more of the value of their crop. The farms are organic and fertiliser-free, and the cherries are hand-picked and washed, yielding specialty coffee with a pure, clean flavor free of off-notes.

Artisan Roasting Excellence

Good beans deserve equally good roasting. To that end, a particularly demanding coffee master roasts this coffee personally. His beans are the ones the Thai royal family specifically requests when visiting Chiang Rai, and his precise craftsmanship is widely respected. Unlike commercial mass production, he insists on small-batch manual roasting and rests the beans before packing so their flavor can fully open up. Orders therefore need to be placed at least 6 days in advance, and only after an order is placed are the beans custom-roasted to the customer's needs. The result is specialty coffee with multi-layered flavor: sweet and clean, with floral and fruit notes, neither sour nor bitter.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

If northern Thailand's clean, floral, lightly roasted Arabica appeals to you, Ethiopia offers one of the world's most vivid expressions of the same flavor family. FrontStreet Huakui is a natural-process Ethiopian heirloom - a mix of undifferentiated native trees, so the beans vary in size, with a delicate floral lift and especially vivid fruit: cream strawberry, mango, jackfruit, citrus, and blueberry. It carries the ripe tropical-fruit tone of a Sidamo natural, and it was a first-place winner in its year's TOH green-bean competition.

For a washed counterpoint, FrontStreet Yirgacheffe Gedingding Cooperative is graded G1 and processed by the classic washed method, showing elegant white florals alongside citrus, orange, and green tea.

Both are exceptional value and a fine introduction to the high-grown Arabica style that Doi Tung and Mae Salong do so well.