What are the Flavor Profiles of Coffee from Yunnan's Four Major Growing Regions? An Introduction to Yunnan Catimor Coffee Characteristics

"Would you like to try our Yunnan beans—FrontStreet Coffee 2013, these are coffee beans we planted in Yunnan." This is what the barista at FrontStreet Coffee would suggest when customers face a blackboard full of bean options and don't know where to start. Some customers light up when they hear these are Yunnan beans, while curious customers might ask an additional question: "What variety are your Yunnan beans? What processing method do you use?" When they learn it's sun-processed Typica variety, most customers will place an order with a desire to try something new.

Why do some customers ask the additional question "What variety? What processing method?" What exactly has Yunnan's small-seed coffee, as China's representative coffee, experienced? To know the full story, let FrontStreet Coffee break it down for you.

The Legendary History of Yunnan Coffee

When talking about the history of Yunnan coffee, we must mention the French Catholic missionary: Alfred Liétard. That year was the 18th year of the Qing Dynasty's Guangxu reign (1892), when Liétard planted coffee seeds brought from Vietnam in Zhukula Village, Yunnan, and taught local villagers about coffee cultivation, grinding, and brewing methods.

By the 1950s and 1960s after the founding of New China, to exclusively supply Soviet Union and Eastern European socialist brother countries, large-scale promotion and development of coffee cultivation began, with products uniformly purchased and processed by the state. This brought Yunnan an opportunity for industrial-scale development.

In 1970, coffee-growing countries in South America like Brazil began to be attacked by rust disease, and the plummeting production directly affected global coffee bean prices. International coffee companies, hoping to reduce dependence on these producing countries, sought new coffee-growing regions to share the risks, such as Africa and Asia.

In the 1980s, during China's reform and opening-up wave, Nestlé established a joint venture company in China and began supporting local coffee industry development through coffee cultivation projects and other methods. Starting from 1992, Nestlé established a Coffee Agriculture Department to specifically guide and research the improvement and cultivation of Yunnan coffee (highlight this point), and purchased coffee according to prices in the US futures market.

As the reform and opening-up process deepened, the third wave of specialty coffee gradually spread from overseas to China, and Yunnan's coffee cultivation industry began exploring the path of specialty coffee. The government introduced special support policies, leading improvements in breeding, cultivation, and processing techniques, gradually enhancing coffee quality and yield.

The Current State of Yunnan Coffee

With specialty coffee shops springing up like mushrooms, Yunnan coffee appearing on bean menus has become increasingly common. So what is the quality of today's specialty coffee beans from Yunnan? The unique flavor of a producing region cannot be separated from its geographical natural conditions, main coffee varieties planted, and primary processing methods.

Yunnan small-seed coffee—in fact, "small-seed" refers to what we commonly hear as Arabica species. Remember the key point highlighted earlier: Nestlé established a Coffee Agriculture Department to specifically guide and research the improvement and cultivation of Yunnan coffee. Under Nestlé's influence, coffee farmers widely cut down their original old varieties (such as Typica) and began大规模 switching to planting the Catimor variety, which has lower costs and higher yields. This also foreshadowed Yunnan's later specialty coffee exploration journey.

Catimor is not a completely pure Arabica species. Catimor is a hybrid variety of Timor and Caturra, while Timor is a variety that carries Robusta genes. This gives coffee trees higher disease resistance, higher yields, and lower cultivation requirements. However, because it carries 1/4 Robusta genes, the coffee's flavor becomes less refined, its aroma is not as rich as pure Arabica, and with crude green bean processing methods, there's a high chance of increased bitterness, astringency, and relatively pungent musty flavors.

In the past, Yunnan coffee beans were mainly used for making instant coffee, so the processing of coffee cherries after harvesting was extremely casual. After embarking on the path of specialty coffee, new attempts have been made in processing coffee cherries. Besides traditional sun-drying and washing methods, honey processing, anaerobic, enzyme treatments and other steps have gradually increased. But the reason why various processing methods are now popular in Yunnan coffee is largely because they originally planted the Catimor variety—equivalent to a "shortcut" to highlight post-processing flavor characteristics without changing varieties and altitude.

After years of exploration on the specialty coffee path, Yunnan coffee's flavor has also stabilized. According to the "Yunnan Coffee Flavor Map Atlas" published by Torch Coffee Laboratory from 2021-2022, we can see that Yunnan coffee primarily features nuts, citrus, and sugars in both dry and wet aromas as well as flavors; additionally, grains, chocolate, and herbal notes also account for a significant proportion of flavor descriptions; woody tones can also be seen in flavor descriptions from a few producing regions.

Why Choose Baoshan and Washed Processing?

FrontStreet Coffee believes that today's general flavor profile of Yunnan coffee comes from the Catimor variety that has been planted for many years and is most widespread, so FrontStreet Coffee selected a washed Catimor from Baoshan as an entry-level daily coffee bean.

As mentioned earlier, in the 1950s and 1960s, Yunnan coffee also had an opportunity for development, which was large-scale cultivation of coffee trees in Baoshan. As the first coffee to go abroad, Baoshan small-seed coffee has received many honors internationally.

Compared to other producing regions, Baoshan has accumulated more experience in coffee cultivation through many years of coffee production. Although most coffee-growing areas have long since switched to planting Catimor varieties, in some old estates/coffee plantations, we can still find some old varieties preserved from the past, which also retains more variety choices for Yunnan on the specialty coffee path.

Among many processing methods, FrontStreet Coffee believes that washed processing can better taste the original flavor of coffee beans, allowing everyone to better understand the terroir flavor of a producing region, so we selected a washed batch from traditional processing methods.

Conclusion

Yunnan coffee faces two major problems on its path to specialty coffee: one is the lack of expressive varieties, and the other is that coffee beans with traditional processing methods lack competitiveness, while those with innovative processing methods are becoming increasingly "magical." What changes will occur in Yunnan's regional flavor, and what path will it take? Let's give Yunnan a bit more time to see if Yunnan coffee can bring us more surprises.

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