We work with 14 partners worldwide, from who we source our coffee. In Myanmar, we work together with This Side Up. On this page you can find everything you need to know about this collaboration.
Together with our friends from This Side Up coffees who facilitate the transport of our Myanmar coffee, we work together with local partner Indigo Mountain who have been at the forefront of specialty coffee development in the region. Apart from export services, Indigo Mountain offers technical, processing, and quality assistance to farmers throughout the 11 villages in the Hopong area.
Khun Kyaw Min Htike, commercial director of Indigo Mountain, visits the farmers twice a week, all year round. "I want to help farmers," he states simply and talks about the complexities of his job. "Sometimes I train people, and they leave for Thailand soon after." Khun continues Indigo Mountain’s farmer-focused mentality nonetheless, amidst the constant competition of Thai smugglers and the obvious and immediate issues posed by the surrounding political climate.
Coffee was introduced to Myanmar by the British but the crop went largely uncultivated; Catholic missionaries brought coffee to the Shan State in the 1930s where most of Myanmar’s coffee is grown today. In the 1980’s the government partnered with the UN to start replacing illegal poppy production with coffee trees. 80 percent of all coffee grown in Myanmar is arabica; robusta is mostly grown in the lowlands, while arabica flourishes at higher altitudes.
The dry and hot weather in the Myanmar highlands during and after harvest time makes the origin perfect for natural (or sun-dried) processing. Most farmers have under 1 hectare of farmland and cultivate less than 20 coffee trees alongside other subsistence crops. Because of good farm practices (for example only picking the ripest red cherries) the quality of the coffee is very high. It's a funky, fruity and spicy coffee.
Myanmar is one of our more controversial origins. After the fall of the decades long military rule in 2015 a lot of effort went into economic development and eradication of poppy cultivation. Specialty coffee became one of the hopes for a better time with farmers setting up an emerging industry essentially from scratch. With the return of the military government, ethnic tensions, international sanctions and the resurgence of poppy cultivation are predominant themes in the news. This has led to coffee companies pulling out and farmers being left in the cold. That’s a shame because a solid partnership with value chain partners provides farmers with some hope for a better future and a disincentive for leaving the country or going into poppy cultivation.
The coffee from Myanmar is available once a year as a Discover Monthly. We sell all of the coffee straight after it comes in, super fresh with a short shelf time. After that another amazing Discover Monthly will be on offer and you will see our Myanmar friends again in a year. Because coffee is a seasonal product in every producing country and logistics are sensitive to changes, the exact timing of the offer is hard to predict.
