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Yunnan coffee

Alexez (349 posts) • 0

Which coffee ( from Yunnan ) is the best for U? Any coffee shop in KM where I can try coffee from different areas or even farmers?

Xiefei (539 posts) • 0

The two main regions are Baoshan and Puer, with most production seeming to shift to Puer these days.

There are quite a few people roasting Yunnan beans these days. Ignore the canned stuff. Try to get it as fresh as possible.

Hani Coffee is available at several locations around town, including Great Australian Bite and Wicker Basket. Good stuff, but a bit dark for my taste.

Manlao Coffee has an organic plantation, and a few different blends, mostly at a medium roast. You can buy their beans at Salvador's or on Taobao.

I believe Salvador's also uses Manlao beans, but do their own roast. Salvador's likes a good dark roast. Again, a little dark for my taste.

Up north (and on Taobao), there's a small roaster called Lanyard Coffee. They roast a wide variety of beans from around the world, and usually have one or two Yunnan varieties on tap. You can find him here:
lanyardcoffee.taobao.com/

As for narrowing down different areas or farmers, that's going to be pretty tough in this market. Everyone seems to be planting the same Arabica Typica varietal, and a lot of green beans seem to be getting mixed around in bulk deals.

Also, outside of some of the very old growing regions around the world, that have carefully matched varietals, growing and processing techniques to the local climate and soil, roasting ends up playing a much bigger factor than what farm or region it came from. Yunnan has only been planting coffee for a short time, and none of that has happened yet.

I'm sure if you went down to Puer, you'd find a lot of people willing to show and tell about their coffee, but how well was it roasted?

bucko (695 posts) • 0

The roast is very important. This is where the Yunnan bean is failing.
Yunnan coffee is not mature enough yet to produce a good quality bean to begin with. If you notice the bean (green) you can see they come in different sizes even from the same crop. That means different moisture content between beans.

When you batch roast these beans, they cook at different rates which make for a very inconsistent roast yielding poor flavor. You can observe this if you watch a roasting. The crack takes place at different times during the roast. They should all crack withing several seconds of each other.
So Yunnan beans cannot be roasted properly unless they are meticulously size sorted first. This is where it all fails because nobody in Yunnan will/would spend the time to do a sort.
Bottom line, Yunnan coffee is not ready for prime time.

Alien (3819 posts) • 0

How close in size do they have to be? The ones I've got right now look like they're all pretty much the same size.

bucko (695 posts) • 0

Visual comparison can be deceiving. They should be VERY close. If you have a precision digital scale, you could really tell best. The weight will vary quite a bit because of the moisture content.

You can get away with using Yunnan beans being blended with a better bean prior to roasting as long as it's about a 75 to 25% ratio. But stand alone, Yunnan beans are just not going to cut it. The trees are just not mature enough. Pretty much the same thing with grapes.

Alexez (349 posts) • 0

Why they sell that Catimur so expensive? Its quite acid taste. In Baoshan we found only 1 coffeeshop. They had a Jamaica Blue Mountain. The cup for 22 kuai, so no people in there, just us . Some locals didn't even know about the shop, took us a while and asking a lot, to find it. That was 2y ago, dont know, now.

Kate (1 post) • 0

Good day everyone! Could you please recommend me coffee producing companies? I need producers of green coffe beans, to supply coffee to Easten Europe. Thank you in advance

jopasny (184 posts) • 0

Can anyone recommend somewhere in Kunming that sells raw (green) Yunnan coffee beans? The last place I bought them was in Dali, but I want something in the city if possible. I tried Lanyard, but they said they don't sell green beans.

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