Our Coffee Story

Meet Sook. She has lived with us and been involved in our business in Thailand for about 5 years now. We refer to her as our daughter.

Sook is from a Karen Hilltribe village called Ban Khun Pae to the west of Chiang Mai.

Her village has become involved in the coffee growing business over the last few years in an effort to generate a cash crop.

Sook along with her family have started growing coffee on their land.

Here is Sook's mum.

 

 

And here is her dad

 

 

The problem for them is they don't have the cash to buy the machinery to process the coffee. That is where we have come in to the picture. We have acquired some of the machinery needed to process the coffee.

We are working with Sook's dad to harvest the coffee he grows and to purchase the freshly harvested coffee fruit from the other villagers, and to take it through to the final roasted bean that we then can market.

 

Here are some views of the land and Sook's village. The coffee is grown organically. Mainly by default as they can't afford to buy artificial fertiliser and instead use the cow manure that is freely available from their farms.
The coffee is grown on the hillsides surrounded by other trees such as avocados and the remains of an old plum orchard.

 

The village is quite high up and during the rainy season a 4 wheel drive vehicle is needed to get up there.

Harvesting of the coffee started a couple of weeks ago and will last for the next 2 months.

The coffee is harvested in the cherry. It is a round red fruit about the size of a cherry that contains 2 beans inside.

 

 

The fruit is put through a pulping machine that removes the flesh. The beans are then soaked in water for a day to remove the excess pulp and put in the sun to dry.

 

 

Once the beans are dry they can be stored.

 

 

The next process is to removed the hard skin that still surrounds the bean.

 

 

Then the really exciting process of roasting the coffee happens. We have had lots of fun learning to roast coffee and tasting it all.

 

 

This final roasted coffee we are selling in our stores in Canada and to coffee shops in Thailand.

 

 

We hope you enjoy it as much as we do. Know that for every cup you drink you are helping Sook, her family and the rest of her village to become more self sustainable.

 



Enjoy.

 

For updates on our coffee harvest check out The Travelling Gardener blog.