What does Yunnan coffee taste like as a natural Arabica?

Yunnan coffee is often mistaken for bitter, but its base is pine, herbal, and nutty, layered with brown sugar, plum acidity, and a tea-like quality. The Menglian small-bean coffee from Front Street is processed with the winey natural method, showing red wine fermentation, longan dried fruit, honey sweetness, and a creamy mouthfeel.

The bean comes from Mangmao Village, Fuyan Township, Menglian County, grown by the Tianyu Farmers' Professional Cooperative at 1,450 to 1,750 meters using the Catimor variety. Fully red cherries and careful fermentation give the coffee high cleanliness and solid sweetness. Washed versions of the same Yunnan arabica read as chocolate, nut, and cream with prominent brown sugar sweetness.

Yunnan coffee is often mistakenly considered bitter, but in fact it has a base of pine, herbal, and nutty notes, combined with local flavors like brown sugar, plum acidity, and a tea-like quality. In recent years, innovative processing methods such as winey natural have made Yunnan beans shine. Front Street Coffee's Yunnan Menglian small-bean coffee is precisely made using the winey natural process, presenting red wine fermentation, longan dried fruit, honey sweetness, and a creamy mouthfeel. This bean comes from Mangmao Village, Fuyan Township, Menglian County, produced by Tianyu Farmers' Professional Cooperative, at an altitude of 1450-1750 meters, with the Catimor variety. After years of exploration, the cooperative finally used fully red cherries and fine fermentation techniques to create a specialty coffee with high cleanliness and excellent sweetness. This article will take you deep into the origin story, processing details, and flavor characteristics of this bean.

Yunnan coffee is usually not a type with prominent bitterness, but if you are not used to it, you may still perceive bitterness. Yunnan beans fall under the category of Asian beans, which often carry pine, herbal, and nutty aromas, and Yunnan coffee adds local characteristics on this basis, such as brown sugar, plum acidity, and some tea-like notes.

If you want to try Chinese specialty coffee, Front Street Yunnan small-bean is the first choice. It uses a single Catimor variety, washed processed, showing a balanced flavor profile. Front Street Yunnan small-bean coffee's dry aroma presents nutty notes, but after entering the mouth it is more chocolate, nut, and creamy flavors, while the brown sugar sweetness is actually more prominent, and the overall taste is quite balanced.

As the coffee industry continues to advance, novel processing methods emerge one after another, and Front Street Coffee's bean list covers almost all current mainstream processing methods. The most eye-catching this year are anaerobic and winey fermentation. Front Street Coffee currently has several anaerobic and winey processed beans, which are very popular among customers in the shop. These processing methods are indeed outstanding and amazing in aroma expression. This Yunnan Menglian small-bean coffee is precisely processed using the winey natural method, with a particularly unique flavor, carrying aromas of fermented red wine and longan dried fruit, honey-like 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 Natural Process

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 misty mountains, which is very conducive to coffee growth, and it is also the birthplace of recent champions in the Yunnan small-bean coffee green bean competition.

The cooperative was established in 2011. From the beginning, it established close cooperation with surrounding coffee farmers, provided technical guidance, led local farmers to grow coffee, and invested funds to support them during the early fertilization stage. After the coffee matured, it was uniformly purchased and processed, thereby avoiding undesirable fermentation caused by long-distance transport of fresh cherries. At first, the cooperative mainly sold commercial coffee to large enterprises such as Nestlé and Starbucks. As Yunnan specialty coffee continued to develop, the cooperative began trying to process specialty coffee using fully red cherries starting from the 2014 season.

Processing Method

Due to lack of experience and the absence of reasonable guidance, the Yunnan coffee processed in the first two years was either under-fermented, overall clean but lacking sufficient flavor support; or over-fermented, with a taste that was hard to accept; or during the drying stage, moisture was not prevented, leading to severe phenolic contamination in the coffee.

After two years of continuously learning from other estates and carrying out a large number of experiments, the cooperative rebuilt the processing station in 2017. It updated the fermentation and washing systems, added wastewater treatment facilities, and customized new drying beds. Finally, in the 2017 season, it produced several batches of good quality and pleasant-flavored winey natural and honey processed lots.

This Yunnan coffee bean's winey natural uses fully red fresh cherries, placed on drying beds until half-dried, then wrapped for a second fermentation. The honey process is depulped and put into inner bags to ferment for 7 days, then spread on drying beds to dry. For both beans, the performance in sweetness and cleanliness made Front Street Coffee very pleasantly surprised; cleanliness and mouthfeel are almost the most important indicators for us in judging whether a bean is worth buying.

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