Thailand Doi Saket Typica

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.

Doi Saket is the oldest coffee-growing area in Thailand, located in Chiang Mai province. Back in the late 1970s, the first Arabica trees that were part of the opium replacement program of the Thai King were tested here, and they have never been replaced by higher-yield cultivars like in many other regions.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 seven years ago. Nui is 36 and an engineer by training, while Aoy is 33 and an accountant. In this lot, we explore the possibility of creating clean and more complex coffee.

Thai Typica is super rare. This natural is the rarest of the rare coffee! We did this pretty meticulously. Firstly, we can only do this lot towards the end of the harvest season when the weather is more stable. Secondly, we picked ripe cherries from Typica trees in the morning and began processing them right away to avoid unwanted fermentation. Thirdly, we hand-sorted only coffee cherries to select only fully ripe ones. Fourthly, we floated the cherries to remove any defective coffee beans. Fifth, we laid the cherries on raised beds in a single layer and minimized the cherries touching each other to ensure even moisture and lack of unwanted fermentation. Sixth, we dried the coffee in a greenhouse in a controlled environment. The drying was carefully monitored over 3 weeks, and we continued to pick out defective cherries until the moisture of the cherries reached 10%. Our cherries to green bean conversion ratio is typically 15% (1 to 0.15) for a lot. But for this lot, the conversion was 5% (1 to 0.05) because we picked out so much.

In terms of green preparation, the coffee went through a destoner, huller, size grader, density table and ended with handsorting. The green passed through the density table multiple times. We shipped coffee in a triple layered bag, which includes a cotton bag in the outer layer, High Density Polyethylene (HDPE) in the middle layer and Grain Pro in the innermost layer.