What Does Yunnan Coffee Taste Like? Key Features of The Region
What does Yunnan coffee taste like? What’s its key flavour? The short answer is it depends. You can basically find anything for acidity from low to high, bitterness from low to high.
Key factors include:
The wide range of varietals grown in this region
The varies of types of soil and climate in key growing areas
Flavour given by the processing method
Experimental process methods like anaerobic fermentation can sometimes give Yunnan coffee a bit of alcoholic/winey taste. As Yunnan is also a key tea-growing and production region, some people tend to associate the taste of Yunnan coffee with tea-like, light body characteristic, which is, in my opinion, not always the case.
To meet the demand and customer preferences of the Chinese domestic market, there are a considerable massive amount of types of flavoured and infused beans are produced. These added flavours might still fall in the wheel, but can be very distinctive sometimes overwhelming so the customers can have an enhanced experience when it is easier for them to tell what it taste like.
One of the challenges about Yunnan coffee is that, its signature flavour is yet to be defined. Unlike other well-developed coffee production region, Yunnan’s industry don’t have enough data and sample to draw a solid conclusion on this question. But there is a good side about it: it is also a place full of unpredictabilities and dynamics.
Despite these with experimental processes, the best Yunnan coffee is often from micro, private and non-industrialised coffee estates, and having traditional process, and. The reason behind it is: they are a bit disconnected from the fast-moving modern consumption world in China, therefore these farmers concentrate on how to grow the best coffee trees and don’t care about the fancy stuffs that much. They change their way of growing, processing every year, and they efforts are paid off by those unexceptionally good beans with impressive performance in flavour and quality. These can be very balanced, aromatic and with distinctive yet natural floral scent - to be, the dream coffee.
It is a pain point that in the current global market, Yunnan coffee can often appears as ‘with very unclear, generic coffee-like taste‘. It is because the domestic market has such high demand for high-quality Yunnan coffee. Once there is a lot that impress people, these good beans can be quickly sold out and nothing really left for the international buyers.
As someone who was born and raised in Yunnan (and loves coffee), I am envisioning a world that I can easily access the best Yunnan coffee from London, or anywhere else in the world. I am planning some trips to visit more those micro estates, those sparkling, blooming hidden gems, and to find out more about their stories and try more good coffee from far east.
/Author: Shai
