Thailand: Aoy & Nui

An initial pop of red cherry candy gives way to a soft but deep hit of fresh banana. On the aftertaste that banana continues, with a light vanilla cream joining it for a rich and indulgent cup.

This is our latest lot from Aoy & Nui Jaisooksern, and it's one we're really excited to share with you. The very first coffees we sourced from Thailand came from Doi Pangkhon and Doi Saket, and they quickly because big favourites. It took us a year to discover Aoy and Nui: an accountant and an engineer who left their city careers behind to take over the family coffee farm and raise their young daughter up in the hills.

That might not sound remarkable. But it is. Across most of the coffee-growing world, younger generations are drifting from the land to the cities, and the people still farming coffee are getting older with every harvest. For coffee to have any kind of future, the countryside has to offer young people a life worth choosing. Aoy and Nui are living proof that it can. That's exactly why we keep coming back to them. You can follow along on their farm's Instagram, @jaisooksernfarm

Their land sits in Doi Saket, in Chiang Mai province, the oldest coffee-growing area in Thailand and one of the first places the late King Bhumibol Adulyadej's opium-replacement programme planted Arabica back in the 1970s. Because those original trees were never torn out and swapped for higher-yielding hybrids, heirloom Typica still grows here in abundance, much of it on trees aged 30 to 40 years. Older, in many cases, than the farmers tending them. Typica is the grandparent of cultivated Arabica, prized for a clean, sweet, elegant cup, but it's become genuinely rare. It yields little and offers next to no resistance to leaf rust, so most farmers replaced it long ago. If you fancy going down the rabbit hole, we've written a whole piece on the Typica variety here.

Then there's the altitude, which is sneakier than it looks. The farm sits between roughly 1,300 and 1,500 metres. Modest on paper, until you factor in latitude. At 19° north of the equator, this counts as high-grown coffee. In Thailand, Arabica can't really push above 1,550m at all. The further you travel from the equator, the lower coffee's ceiling drops, so the same elevation does very different work depending on where you are. For comparison, Colombia's Nariño sits at 1° north and Nicaragua's Matagalpa around 13°; both can grow far higher. Aoy and Nui are farming right at the upper edge of what's possible.

This year's lot has been processed as an anaerobic natural, and you can taste the skill in it. We've watched their command of this kind of processing sharpen season on season, and the proof is in the cup: that clear funk we mentioned, held in check rather than left to run wild. Clean lines, deep fruit, no muddle.

None of it reaches your cup alone, mind. The processing is in the hands of our sourcing partners Beanspire, the Thai exporter we've worked with since 2017, founded by Fuadi Pitsuwan and Jane Kittiratanapaiboon to put Thai specialty coffee on the map. When Beanspire began, Thailand exported only 1% of its coffee production to the international market; today that figure sits around 10%. Bringing the coffee the rest of the way is our importer This Side Up, who are mid-way through becoming a steward-owned business and are unlike any importer we know. We're proud to present this as what it really is: a collaboration, with credit due to the producers and the processor alike.

So pour a cup, take your time, and taste what happens when two people bet their careers on a hillside in northern Thailand. We think they made the right call.

• Country: Thailand
• Province: Chiang Mai
• Region: Doi Saket
• Elevation: 1,350 m.a.s.l.
• Latitude: 19º north of the equator
• Varietal: Typica
• Fermentation: Anaerobic
• Processing method: Natural
• Producers: Aoy & Nui Jaisookern x Beanspire

Medium dark
We take this one deep into the development phase after first crack, giving the body time to fill out and the sweetness to build. Pulling back just at the edge of second crack is the sweet spot for this coffee: the banana gets its weight, the vanilla cream settles in, and the fruit stays clean.

Cupping Notes: Banana, red cherry candy, vanilla cream.

Cup of Excellence Cupping Scores

• Clean Cup: 6/8
• Sweetness: 6.5/8
• Acidity: 7/8
• Mouthfeel: 6/8
• Flavour: 7/8
• Aftertaste: 6/8
• Balance: 6/8
• Overall: 7/8
• Correction: +36
• Total: 87.5/100

If you'd like to find out more about how we score coffees, make sure to read our blog post “What Do Coffee Cupping Scores Actually Mean?” and if you'd like to try cupping yourself, we've got a guide to that too! What is Coffee Cupping.