The Art of Burma Coffee
@WELOVECHIN
1. Wildlife. Explore Chin. An array of highlands is enough to take your breath away. This is a region, best experienced on foot, during extended hikes—you truly absorb its energy, and better understand its nuances, when you meander through its lush forests. (Our customers are fan of the Nat Coffee origin tours – enough to mention our package (Chin can be booked separately): www.natcoffee.com/origintrip)
2. Paradise. Need proof of Chin’s wonderful diversity, culinary and otherwise? Thrive through Chin coffee gardens and you will find 50+ different crops. Ask one of our coffee farmers to take you on a stroll across their plantations and they will be happy tp show you their crops. Even though most of the gardens are less than two acres, each single plot is used for cultivation of an exotic fruit trees that often provides shade to the coffee.
Reveal Teddim City, Northern Chin State, Shwedagon Pagoda, Myanmar, Chin tattoos
3. From Chin with Precious Love. Chin coffees are rare, produced in limited quantity (a few tons for export only). Coffee cherries are picked by Chin Litäi coffee group end of February during the peak time of the harvest. In 2018, some microlots were harvested during the last picking rounds. The result of the carefully picked coffee: a delightful aroma that reminds of the sweetness of a port wine. The late-harvest-picking is a method that has been used in viniculture and applied to grandcru coffees before.
4. Wild-grown. Chin coffee is mostly wild-grown. It is a natural product that can be found at the foot of the National Park Mt Victoria and the nearby forests.
Maintaining these forests is difficult. Without adequate resources to police such a large area, the Chin forest became “open access” – anyone could go in and take what they wanted and they rarely got apprehended. Securing the future of wild coffee and the forests it lives in needs local people to maintain and use these forests, to earn a living from them so they can afford to protect them in the long term and want to do so.
Our vision is of a fair and sustainable future for wild plant resources and people.
Learn more about the FairWild Standard: http://www.fairwild.org/
5. Social Project – Seed the future coffee generation: You don’t see the Chin coffees in the international market yet because of Myanmar’s 60 years of political and economical isolation. To develop a new coffee region, it takes about 5 years – a long breath for a startup, you might say, sure, but we believe in our long term project. With Chin Litäi Group – a group of young coffee entrepreneurs – we have been tirelessly working in the Chin jungle the past two years and will continue for the next 50 years. Our social project includes meticulous ground work in coffee cultivation and processing. You don’t want to miss to be part of our project development and be surprised after a few years about unseen quality in the cup!
6. Intensity of taste: Warm notes of spices, licorice, and blackcurrant will warm you up during the cold European winter days. Time to take a zen break, drink a cup of Chin coffee facing the blazing nature of Switzerland during fall… 🍁Nothing can top a wild-grown coffee in taste. The coffee cherries were dried on a longer average time (estimated 30 days) than specialty coffees from coffee region Mandalay or Shan State.
7. ZeroWaste Coffee. Drying coffee is a testament of the local culture. During the past two years it was en vogue in Myanmar to produce sun-dried coffee, but nothing beats the taste of the Chin naturals. The coffees are processed on raised African beds that were financed by our kickstarter community in 2016. Whatever can be placed in bamboo baskets on terrasses (hot pepper, tamarind, millet seeds, garlic, yam) will be naturally processed for home-consumption and sales to the local market.
8. Connectivity. Purchase one bag of coffee, be connected with the producer! If you buy Chin specialty coffee for the first time, you will automatically have access into an unparalleled world of secrets. The need of connectivity is huge in Chin State because of its remoteness. Although places are hard to access by car, you will find mobile towers. Is there anything else needed to get directly in touch with our farmers community Chin Litäi and get first-hand information?
9. Coffee Identity. Each microlot can be tracked to the farmer and its village thanks to accurate and professional work of our farmer group.
10. Local barista experience add to quality. You didn’t see any local coffee shop until last September when Horn Bill Coffee was the first startup to bring local coffee beverages to Mindat, Southern Chin State. Is there any better way to improve the quality of the local coffee? Coffee producers will have access to their own coffee that they rarely drunk in the past. “We are happy to serve you.”