China Yunnan – Torch Coffee – Nine Dragon Honey Processed

Burman Coffee Traders

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Honey

Roast Suitability

Description

A tasty and exotic honey processed coming from our buddies @ Torch Coffee, in Pu’er, which is the heart of coffee (and tea) growing in the country. This honey processed is milder than the natural or anaerobic but still a more wild cup compared to traditional washed processing. This one will be for natural processed and slow dried coffee fans. Yunnan grows close to all of the Chinese crop, around 98 percent of it, and Pu’er by itself is credited with roughly 60 percent of national production. Coffee reached the province back in the late 1800s with a French missionary, but the industry we buy from today really started in 1988, when a government program together with the World Bank and the UNDP pushed planting across the south of Yunnan. Most of what grows there is Catimor, planted mostly between 1000 and 1500 meters, picked by hand and processed by smallholders on their own small wet mills. Torch Coffee has been our way into Chinese coffees for a few seasons now. They moved their team into Yunnan in late 2014 and built their base in Pu’er around farms, processing mills, a roastery, a training lab, a cafe, and their own export operation, so the people teaching cupping and processing classes are the same ones handling cherry during harvest. Their Mountain Man Project has trained more than 400 farmers since 2017, and a good share of their production is processing to order, where the flavor target gets agreed on first and then developed with a specific grower. Nine Dragon is one of their honey lots, and we would rank it a Black Honey, which is pretty close to the natural processed. Honey, or pulped natural, means the skin is removed but part of the sticky mucilage is left on the parchment while it dries, so those sugars stay with the seed instead of being rinsed away. That is still the exception in Yunnan, where more than 90 percent of the coffee is fully washed, and it sits right in the middle of the road: more sweetness and fruit than a washed Catimor, nothing like as l