By Lance Leasure, Owner of Town & Country Coffee
I recently shared a summary of coffee’s centuries-long migration from eastern Africa to the rest of the world. Unfortunately, editorial brevity forced me to gloss over and omit numerous details.
For instance, I shared the role Sri Lanka played in spreading coffee throughout Asia but failed to venture further into the region, one of the largest and most prominent in the world.
For many, Asia isn’t the first place they think of when it comes to coffee production. However, it is responsible for approximately 30% of the global coffee supply and boasts over ten coffee-producing countries, including the world’s second and third (or fourth) largest producers.
Perhaps the most famous coffee-producing country in Asia is Indonesia. Depending on the year, Indonesia is the third or fourth-largest coffee producer globally, trading places with Colombia. A few of the better-known coffee-growing regions of Indonesia include Sumatra, Sulawesi, Java, and Bali.
Indonesian coffee is exceptional and often considered smooth, sweet, and well-balanced. Typical flavor notes from the largest regions include cocoa, tobacco, smoke, earth, spice, and cedar. Like wine, these flavors are influenced by various factors such as growing methods, the type of soil, and climate.
As a coffee roaster, I find coffee from Indonesia both thrilling and frustrating. This is because most of the coffee produced in Indonesia comes from small-holder or tiny farms with relatively little standardization. Unlike larger, more uniform farm systems in other countries, these farms use various cultivation methods from one to the next. They manage their soil differently, grow their coffee alongside and/or under the shade of varying crops, and have numerous means of harvesting, processing, and transporting coffee. When these variables combine from many farms into a single bag, it becomes challenging for a coffee company to deliver consistent flavor notes from year to year. That aside, this approach’s diversity helps create attractive opportunities for exciting new releases.
Other Asian coffee-producing countries include Papua New Guinea, Laos, the Philippines, Thailand, and East Timor. Two additional major players are China and Vietnam. That China is a significant provider of one of the world’s largest commodities probably isn’t surprising these days. What is noteworthy is that as the 13th largest producer of coffee, China didn’t start cultivating coffee in earnest until 1988.
When I tell people that Vietnam is the world’s second-largest coffee producer, behind Brazil, they often look at me in disbelief. Well, it’s true. Coffee was first introduced to the country in the mid-19th century by the French, steadily growing in economic significance ever since. Traditionally, nearly all the coffee from Vietnam has been Robusta, which, as I’ve explained previously, is an economically less desirable variety. This trend is changing rapidly, and the country is beginning to deliver increasingly impressive crops of Arabica.
“At Town & Country Coffee, we’ve found a Vietnamese bean that offers the flavor notes we love in a solid Sumatra but with a season-to-season consistency in which we’ve grown confident.”
Try our popular breakfast blend, Rouse, and see if you can detect hints of tobacco, earth, cigar box, and spice. Some days, there’s no better way to wake up and live!
