How does Yunnan coffee from Menglian taste?

Yunnan coffee is often called bitter, but the pine, herbal and nutty traits of Asian beans blend with brown sugar, plum acidity and a tea-like quality in this region. Menglian small bean, grown at 1,450-1,750 meters in Mangmao Village, Fuyan Township, uses winey sun-dried processing and brings fermented red wine and dried longan aromas, honeyed sweetness and a creamy mouthfeel.

Yunnan beans are commonly a single Catimor variety; the washed version shows nutty dry aroma with chocolate, nut and creamy notes in the cup. The Menglian Tianyu Farmers' Professional Cooperative began with commercial beans, weathered setbacks and produced a clean, sweet, winey sun-dried lot in 2017. Winey and anaerobic fermentation are currently popular processing methods, though simple handling often suits good green coffee.

Yunnan coffee is often labeled as "bitter," but the pine, herbal, and nutty undertones characteristic of Asian beans merge with brown sugar, plum acidity, and a tea-like quality in the Yunnan region, creating a distinctive local flavor. If you want to try Chinese specialty coffee, Front Street Yunnan small bean is an excellent entry point, while Menglian small bean stands out even more with its winey sun-dried processing, bringing aromas of fermented red wine and dried longan fruit, with a honeyed sweetness and creamy mouthfeel that is stunning. This article will guide you through how Menglian Tianyu Farmers' Professional Cooperative started with commercial beans, weathered setbacks, and ultimately produced a clean, sweet, winey sun-dried lot in 2017, and analyze the terroir and processing details of this Catimor.

Yunnan coffee is not inherently bitter; it's just that those unaccustomed to it easily perceive bitterness. Yunnan beans fall under the category of Asian beans, which often carry pine, herbal, and nutty tones, and Yunnan adds its own local characteristics on top of that, such as brown sugar, plum acidity, and a tea-like sensation.

If you want to try Chinese specialty coffee, Front Street Yunnan small bean is a good starting point. It uses a single Catimor variety, washed processed, with an overall balanced profile. The dry aroma of Front Street Yunnan small bean coffee presents nutty notes, and upon sipping, chocolate, nut, and creamy flavors become more prominent, while the brown sugar sweetness is actually more noticeable, making for a quite balanced mouthfeel.

The coffee industry is constantly advancing, with novel processing methods emerging endlessly, and Front Street Coffee's bean list covers almost all current mainstream processing methods. This year, anaerobic and winey fermentation are especially popular, and Front Street Coffee has also stocked multiple such beans, which are quite favored by customers in the shop. These processing methods indeed perform spectacularly in aroma expression. This Yunnan Menglian small bean uses winey sun-dried processing, with a unique flavor, carrying aromas of fermented red wine and dried longan fruit, honeyed sweetness, and a creamy mouthfeel.

Front Street Coffee Yunnan Menglian Small Bean Coffee

Region: Mangmao Village, Fuyan Township, Menglian County, Yunnan

Altitude: 1450-1750 meters

Processing Method: Winey Sun-Dried Processing

Variety: Catimor

Menglian Tianyu Farmers' Professional Cooperative

Menglian Dai, Lahu, and Wa Autonomous County is located in Pu'er City, Yunnan Province, bordering Myanmar to the west and south. This Yunnan coffee comes from Menglian County. The local average altitude is about 1500 meters, with significant temperature differences between day and night and frequent mountain mist, providing ideal conditions for coffee growth. In recent years, it has also been the birthplace of champions in the Yunnan small bean coffee green bean competition.

The cooperative was established in 2011, and from the start, it built close partnerships with surrounding coffee farmers, providing technical guidance, motivating local farmers to grow coffee, and investing funds to support fertilization in the early stages. After the coffee matured, it was uniformly purchased and processed, thus avoiding undesirable fermentation caused by long-distance transport of fresh cherries. Initially, the cooperative mainly sold commercial coffee to large enterprises like Nestlé and Starbucks. As the wave of Yunnan specialty coffee rose, the cooperative began attempting fully ripe cherry specialty coffee processing from the 2014 harvest season.

Processing Method

Due to lack of experience and proper guidance, the Yunnan coffee processed in the first two years was either under-fermented—clean but lacking in flavor; over-fermented—with an unacceptable taste; or not protected against moisture regain during the drying stage, causing severe phenolic contamination.

After two years of continuously learning from other estates and conducting numerous experiments, the cooperative rebuilt the processing station in 2017, updated the fermentation and washing systems, added wastewater treatment facilities, and customized new drying beds. Finally, in the 2017 harvest season, they produced several high-quality, pleasant-flavored winey sun-dried and honey-processed lots.

This Yunnan winey sun-dried lot selects fully ripe fresh cherries, dries them on drying beds until semi-dry, then wraps them for a second fermentation. For the honey process, the beans are depulped, placed in inner bags to ferment for 7 days, then spread on drying beds to dry. Both beans' performance in sweetness and cleanliness greatly surprised Front Street Coffee—cleanliness and mouthfeel are almost our most important indicators for judging whether a bean is worth purchasing.

The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.