Behind the bean
We talked to Yongyuth Chuepa for many times and he always confirms his motivation to make even better version of agriculturalist and being agricultural entrepreneur to support his community. Yongyuth is sharing the family farm in Maejantai village where many young farmers are started their coffee processing station. He started the career as coffee entrepreneur around 2018 and integrated multicropping into his family coffee farm by growing avocado, stone fruits and tea.
His motivation is to elevate the coffee culture in a coffee growing community and continue to produce a unique and high-quality coffee. He also wishes to validate the difference between the old traditional coffee processing like washed, honey and natural and a new technique like an anaerobic culture into his coffee processing. Therefore, processing this coffee as the anaerobic honey is to extend his knowledge and experiences.
Yongyuth is harvesting ripe coffee cherries at his plantation.
Yongyuth is always selecting a ripe coffee cherry and allow himself learning all stages from harvest to sorting a defect cherry before starting his process. He thought about the master stage when his coffee is reaching to customer hands and appreciation of his coffee. However, making honey coffee as a new version or a new taste is challenging his working hours and concentration because the process needs a lot of detail to be observed.
Yongyuth’s coffee cherries in the bag and basket.
He found that his Anaerobic honey coffee is giving an outstanding character and complex. He also added that the elevation of his coffee farm at 1390 meters above sea level could extended the maturity of the coffee cherries and that gives enough time to develop important nutrition which enhanced the cup quality. The uniqueness of the anaerobic fermentation is to round the taste of coffee and allowing natural yeast complete the fermentation process that gives many perfumed flavours. He started to realized that the anaerobic fermentation is giving very aromatic and complexity that reminding sweetness like honey, brown sugar and even prune or raisin. The fermented coffee cherries will be pulped with pulping machine without water, sort the shell or cascara of coffee cherry out and dry on the drying bed under open sun. “The colour and smell of sticky parchment of anaerobic honey is amazing and I could feel so many complexities and flavours are developing during this stage” Yongyuth added. For us, to see his passion and goal to produce a quality coffee at his hometown is very encouraging and understand the importance of supporting a young coffee entrepreneur like him growing in the specialty coffee industry is a the priority.
Yongyuth’s anaerobic honey coffee is drying on drying bed in Maejantai village.
He also explained more details about his Anaerobic Honey for us, he started from cleaning all coffee cherries after harvesting and dry overnight as airing before starting a fermentation for 8-9 days in the anaerobic environment. The cherries pulped and ferment the sticky parchment again in the bag for 3 days, so we could also be called double anaerobic fermentation for this coffee. He dried parchment coffee on the drying bed and allowed the parchment dried slowly. The parchments which were drying slowly would retain a beautiful husk without clacking or damaging. And this is important part because the direct sun that hit the green bean inside a parchment could destroy the coffee cell walls or green been that decrease a quality of coffee tremendously.