Yunnan Pu 'er Starbucks, famous for tea, buys Yunnan Pu' er Yunnan small coffee beans

The wave of boutique coffee is changing the purchase of Yunnan Pu'er coffee by Yunnan Pu'er Starbucks, which is famous for tea.

Menglian County, Pu 'er City, Yunnan Province, on the border between China and Myanmar. Shen Xuejing was a little depressed because the owner of the hill she was on told her that the batch of coffee beans she had come to taste was gone after five hours by car from Pu 'er, 230 kilometers away. Shen Xuejing, a barista from Shanghai, took a course in green bean processing at Pu 'er last December.

Before reaching the top of the mountain, she took out her iPhone and looked at the elevation here-one of the key factors determining coffee growth-and then observed the surrounding geographical environment."This batch of beans should reach SCAA (American Fine Coffee Association) system 85 points or so." Shen Xuejing said. Usually more than 80 points in this system can be made into fine coffee.

There was no other way. Shen Xuejing could only return regretfully. Halfway through, she met Ted Lingle, founder of the World Fine Coffee Association, and people with her told Shen Xuejing that they were also here for the beans. Behind them, there were people from CCTV's documentary team who had just finished shooting the location of the film.

Menglian County, Pu 'er City, Yunnan Province

Nanjing West Road, Shanghai, more than 2000 kilometers away. At Starbucks Reserve Shanghai Roastery, which had just opened, two huge coffee roasters were working freely, where the batch of coffee beans they were curious about was finally processed.

This is a single-origin coffee bean from Pu 'er, Yunnan Province, which has been specially treated by yellow honey treatment, which is more complicated than conventional sun and washing treatment. It is also the first time Starbucks has included Yunnan coffee beans in its high-end brand Starbucks Reserve product line.

Of course, there is no lack of marketing implications, and the importance of the Chinese market to Starbucks is beyond doubt. But in the specialty coffee world, Yunnan beans are often chosen to be blended with other beans. This time, big companies such as Starbucks launched Yunnan coffee beans from a single origin under the high-end product line, which seems to prove one thing to the whole industry that Yunnan coffee is very different.

Starbucks selects Yunnan single origin coffee beans for the first time

There's coffee in Pu 'er, so Starbucks comes.

Li Xinhua, 45, also hopes to produce such fine coffee beans.

Although he visited Starbucks only once, he didn't know how the so-called "third coffee wave" was spreading on a large scale. Driven by this wave, specialty coffee from a single origin, unique flavor and hand-brewed is gaining popularity worldwide.

He doesn't seem to care either, except that specialty coffee can fetch a higher price. Li Xinhua grows coffee beans on a 300-acre estate in Pu 'er, 90% of which will be bought by Starbucks.

In fact, besides tea, Yunnan Pu 'er also produces coffee. In 2007, Simao City was renamed Pu 'er City because the Pu' er tea produced here was once famous in the market. However, this cannot stop local farmers from losing their enthusiasm for planting tea. In the year of renaming, Pu 'er tea, once heated, returned to rationality from high prices, and a large number of tea farmers suffered heavy losses. So they started cutting down tea trees on a massive scale to grow coffee.

Based on the market reaction, the local government of Yunnan also has plans to turn the local tea planting area into a stock market and ensure that it will not increase at about 6 million mu by 2017. As a result, coffee plantations began to multiply.

In fact, there are no coffee varieties in the original plant spectrum of China. In 1893, English missionary Jing Ji introduced coffee to Yunnan. From then on, Yunnan also had the habit of growing coffee.

Today, nearly 100,000 to 140,000 tons of coffee are produced annually in Yunnan, which is 99% of China's coffee production. Pu 'er accounts for 60% of coffee production. Coffee growth requires certain climatic conditions, usually 25 degrees north and south latitude this area is called "coffee belt"-here the soil, climate, rainfall, altitude and sunshine are more suitable for coffee growth-Yunnan Pu 'er is also among them.

Li Xinhua's coffee planting technology is pieced together.

Because when coffee was grown in 2007, the market had little demand for coffee quality. For a long time, Pu 'er mainly planted coffee beans needed by the public exchange. These beans are exported abroad for instant coffee making. In 1989, Nescafe entered Pu 'er and brought the coffee variety Katim.

This coffee variety is suited to Nestle's needs-consistent high yields. The coffee buyer needs to get a lot of coffee beans here to make instant coffee. This variety is highly resistant to disease, and while a plant disease called leaf rust kills other coffee varieties, katim remains immune.

During the harvest season, kannon's handling method is also extremely simple and direct. All fruits, ripe or not, are harvested to increase yield. At the same time, it is directly exposed to the sun on the ground. There is no special sun equipment, and there is no need to record the temperature and humidity of coffee beans.

Such beans are bought at prices set by Nestle with reference to international futures. For instant coffee, this method of production is not fatal.

Although Nestle has contributed to the development of Yunnan coffee in the past 30 years, so that local coffee farmers have enough stable income sources, this extensive production mode regardless of quality has lasted for quite a long time here.

It wasn't until 2014 that Li Xinhua tried to sell coffee beans to Starbucks that he found that this method was no longer working.

In 2012, this coffee brand from Seattle, USA, entered Yunnan. It set up a coffee grower support center here and established Starbucks Aini Coffee (Yunnan) Co., Ltd., a joint venture with local enterprises, to source coffee and carry out primary processing.

All farmers who want to sell coffee beans to Starbucks need to pass Starbucks 'Coffee and Grower Fairness Code (C.A.F.E.). Practices). This certification is evaluated by a third party and includes aspects such as quality, social responsibility and environmental protection.

Pu 'er Local adopted the Coffee and Grower Fairness Code (C.A.F.E.) A certified coffee estate

But no one knew Starbucks in Pu 'er in 2012.

Aaron Tong, director of Starbucks Grower Support Center, organized the first training in Yunnan that year, with only 25 people coming. He and agronomist to visit the manor, about a good time to the manor, manor owner and tactfully refused. Starbucks has introduced a strategy of "good quality and good price" in Yunnan-coffee beans purchased can be accepted if they pass Starbucks 'inspection; if they exceed their regular standards, such as large particle size, they can receive additional rewards.

"My goal is simple. I want to receive good beans. The goal of the farmers is also simple. They want more income." he said.

Aaron Tong, Director of Starbucks Grower Support Center

After Li Xinhua heard this strategy, he took the initiative to add a pool for sewage treatment in his manor. Starbucks sent agronomists to his estate to train him. Tell him to fertilize before rain and before flowering so fertilizer ferments efficiently and the coffee fruit absorbs more nutrients to grow fuller; or pour quicklime into the sewage treatment tank because the wastewater from coffee washing is highly acidic and can cause environmental damage.

Starbucks agronomists also advise local farmers to harvest all the red fruit and plant shade trees next to the coffee trees--to avoid sun damage while the coffee trees are still immature, and to create a better microclimate around them to help the fruit absorb nutrients when they are mature.

Just because a coffee farmer is certified doesn't mean his beans can be purchased by Starbucks. Every morning, trucks full of coffee beans queue up to enter Starbucks 'local factory.

Agronomists would sample packets of beans with a sampler that looked like a sharp steel pipe. Then sent to the factory inspection department, from the defect rate, particle size, flavor and other standards for testing. During the harvest season, each cup judge drinks an average of 200 cups of coffee a day; at peak times, the number of cups consumed per day is as high as 300 cups.

At present, 1678 Yunnan coffee farms have passed this certification, with a total planting area of more than 16000 hectares.

Local farmers 'trucks line up in front of Starbucks' factory in Pu 'er, Yunnan

In 2014, Li Xinhua also passed Starbucks certification. And sold the beans to Starbucks for 2 yuan more than the purchase price per kilogram at that time. However, there is also the worst case. If the coffee beans are not approved by Starbucks, their fate is to sell them to other factories for 1 yuan to 2 yuan below the market price. If the cost is not well controlled, the farmers are likely to fall into a loss situation.

What Starbucks is doing in Yunnan is similar to the coffee company's marketing strategy in China. With the concept of coffee culture and the third space, it made this country, which used to drink tea, accept and love coffee. And upstream of this industry chain, Starbucks is making up for the industry.

In fact, Li Xinhua also knows that it is impossible to transition directly from large-scale coffee production to the era of fine coffee.

The same goes for Starbucks. In January 2009, Starbucks launched "Fengwu Xiangyun" mixed coffee. This coffee is Starbucks 'first use of Yunnan coffee beans in China, but it has been blended. It wasn't until January 2017, five years after Starbucks 'Yunnan project, that Starbucks launched its first single-origin coffee beans from China.

Starbucks "Fengwu Xiangyun" coffee beans

To some extent, Starbucks is also creating conditions for the outbreak of Yunnan coffee refinement. For example, the requirement of all-red fruit picking and shade trees is also an essential part of the fine coffee production process.

Fine coffee is a premium for coffee farmers. This is difficult to achieve in the era of mass exports, dominated by futures prices. The essence of Starbucks '"high quality and good price" strategy is to let Yunnan coffee market jump out of futures price to some extent and introduce a price system dominated by quality and market demand_this is also the mode in which the fine coffee market is operating.

So Li Xinhua now feels that he can do more.

When he heard that someone could sell fine coffee beans for 88 yuan a kilogram, he wanted to try it himself.

The Evangelist of Fine Coffee

88 yuan a kilo. This is a small batch of fine coffee beans, so it can be sold at 2 to 4 times the market price. At present, in Yunnan, such fine coffee beans account for about 2% to 5% of the total production. In 2014, the concept of fine coffee began to be introduced into Yunnan Pu 'er, including large and small companies, coffee training institutions and independent fine coffee practitioners. They brought a concept and evaluation system for fine coffee.

The biggest characteristic of fine coffee beans is their unique flavor. You can taste fruit, flowers, herbs or tobacco in the coffee beans brewed from it. A key factor in determining these is the processing of the beans, such as washing or sunning, which artificially controls the flavor of the beans.

The whole process is detailed.

From the beginning of picking, it needs to be extremely fastidious. Coffee farmers can only choose fully ripe red fruits to pick, and then wash and separate out inferior coffee beans. During the processing stage, the humidity, temperature and sugar content of coffee beans need to be recorded. If it's sun treatment, there's a lot to be said for when and how many times the beans are turned, the size of the tanning bed, and the thickness of the beans--all of which ultimately affect the final flavor.

Fine coffee needs all red fruit picking (Photo source: Shen Xuejing)

Sunlight treatment of fine coffee (photo source: Shen Xuejing)

When Shen Xuejing received training in green coffee bean treatment in Pu 'er, she also needed to repeat the experiments of these treatment processes. In the same course, a nearly 60-year-old farmer gave up several times in the middle of the course."You can't finish it. It's too much trouble with such complicated tools."

Li Xinhua also has the same hesitation, he and other farmers will often talk about whether to do fine products this question.

"You spend so much labor and effort to do it, but you might not be able to do it well in the end. You think what you did is excellent, but take it to the hand-made bean merchant. They say it's not excellent, and it hasn't reached the standard of excellent." he said. Li Xinhua has two children. If his family can live a decent life in the local area according to the current way of operation, it is not a problem. He has built a private house locally by growing coffee beans and bought a car.

However, if Pu 'er wants to produce fine coffee, it must pay special attention to the processing links such as washing or sun drying.

Because in the era when Nestle dominated the region, farmers grew a single variety of katim. The flavor of this variety is not unique and requires some special processing to give it a rich taste. For farmers, this requires multiple increases in time and labor.

In order to harvest fine coffee beans that satisfy him in Yunnan, Chen Danqi and his team travel to Yunnan nearly 100 times.

Chen Danqi is the Global Green Bean Program Leader for boutique coffee brand Seesaw. The main task of this job is to search and customize fine coffee beans that meet Seesaw quality standards on a global scale. Chen Danqi has been to Panama, Colombia, Guatemala and other world-famous coffee producing areas. Before he first arrived in Yunnan in 2013, he had heard that the industry generally did not believe that Yunnan had so-called fine coffee.

But when he arrived, he found that Yunnan actually had potential, but it lagged behind in information and technology. Therefore, he chose a manor and asked the other party to make fine coffee according to the strict production process. He ate and lived in the manor with the coffee farmers and processed the coffee together. Chen Danqi found that Yunnan can also produce fine coffee that meets market demand if it operates according to certain specifications.

However, when he left Yunnan and returned to Shanghai, the quality of coffee beans sent from Pu 'er plummeted, completely different from the standard he could reach when he was stationed in the manor.

"Later I discovered that just asking for them wasn't enough." "Technological change is not difficult," he said,"because the real problem is not here. What should be done may not only be technological innovation, but also cognitive innovation."

The team processes coffee beans with coffee farmers locally in Pu 'er

Later, Chen Danqi launched a Yunnan project with the support of Zong Xinkuang, founder of Seesaw. He defined the core foundation of this plan as "common values", based on common cognition, and together changed the future of Yunnan coffee. He and his team took turns coming to Yunnan, communicating with different estates, spending a lot of time with growers, training them to understand the needs of the market, learning the quality identification of coffee beans, and using the processing methods they learned from other coffees in the world to optimize the flavor of Yunnan fine coffee beans.

It also collates all the information and processing methods into books and sends them to farmers. There is a detailed treatment process on each page, and temperature and humidity detectors, sweetness meters, and instruments for measuring soil acidity and alkalinity are sent to farmers. Because the most important thing is that these growers realize that the higher the quality, the higher the price-as long as the coffee beans are produced in line, the company will buy them; the price is around 40 yuan, and there is a higher premium for particularly good quality.

This boutique coffee brand has worked with a total of 33 estates here, and this year it has selected six estates for more in-depth cooperation. In addition to the coffee beans used in their own stores, they have also begun to export, bringing Yunnan coffee to the world.

A local cooperative manor in Yunnan

"but not every buyer will do that." Said Hou Ye, negative production manager at Torch Coffee Lab. "Seesaw is serious about it. But with more raw beans, I can buy better raw beans in the international market at the same price. Why spend the cost of time on educating farmers? "

Hou Ye, who worked on raw coffee beans in Beijing in 2015, came to Pu'er to study. Then she decided to join Torch--, which was founded by American Samuel Gurel. The barista, who is engaged in raw bean processing, is also optimistic about Yunnan coffee and moved here.

If the information is exchanged and the concept of Ka Nong is changed, Hou Ye believes that the quality of Yunnan boutique coffee can be improved rapidly. Because when she conducted a cup test in 2015, she found that there were still many defects in the flavor of Yunnan boutique coffee, but now when she drinks it, she has obviously felt the difference.

In Pu'er, we not only do raw bean processing, but also conduct course training, including raw bean processing, baking and so on. In Pu'er, such training institutions are gradually increasing. There are also many big names from the international coffee industry here. For example, Ted Lingle, co-founder of the American Fine Coffee Association (SCAA) and the Coffee quality Research Institute (CQI), has been paying attention to Yunnan Coffee since 2014. As a judge of Pu'er Raw Bean Competition, and then as a senior consultant of Yunnan Coffee Trading Center, he helped Yunnan Coffee complete its docking with SCAA and CQI.

But these messages are still difficult to reach the ears of ordinary farmers.

Hou Ye found that the people who came to class were basically boutique coffee practitioners in first-tier cities such as Shen Xuejing, who went to the producing area to learn more about the coffee supply chain, and young people who owned coffee estates at home. they identify with boutique coffee more than their parents.

A young man who grows coffee

Starbucks may be able to take advantage of big companies here.

The company did not turn a blind eye to the third coffee wave. On March 1, 2018, Starbucks opened its first selected store in Seattle-a high-end coffee brand run by Starbucks founder Howard-and other boutique coffee shops billed as single-origin hand-brewed boutiques. In December 2017, when Starbucks opened its bakery in Shanghai, Yunnan coffee appeared among the selected brands for the first time.

In addition to the selection series, Starbucks also launched a single origin of Yunnan coffee beans.

The Starbucks Cafe support Center also encourages Pu'er farmers to try to grow boutique coffee in small quantities and earn more at higher prices.

Tong Aaron and his team have been experimenting with various boutique coffee processing methods that meet Starbucks standards in Pu'er. And it plans to train 4,000 to 5,000 coffee farmers on boutique coffee at the Starbucks Coffee suppliers Conference in 2018-a similar event for coffee farmers, thanking and commending farmers who have cooperated in the past year. It has been held three times in a row, with more than 4000 people participating last year. In 2018, Yunnan coffee beans will continue to appear in the Zhenxuan series after being processed in a richer way.

Starbucks is experimenting with coffee honey treatment in Yunnan

The scale advantages of large companies are not limited to this.

The most important problem for Yunnan boutique coffee beans to solve is the branding of products-names that often appear on the menus of boutique coffee shops such as Colombia, Guatemala and Manila. At present, Yunnan's boutique coffee beans are mostly used to match with other coffee beans to make up for its lack of flavor.

Even in Shanghai, a city where boutique coffee already has a certain scale, only a few boutique coffee stores use Yunnan coffee beans from a single origin.

"now Yunnan coffee beans are one of my favorite beans." Lindsay said. She is from Italy and runs a boutique coffee shop called volcan on Yongkang Road in Shanghai. This is also one of the earliest boutique coffee shops in Shanghai. "the flavor is well balanced with some nutty and fruity aromas."

Yunnan-made coffee has also been promoted in stores, which is one of the more popular single-origin hand-brewed coffee of this brand. According to Shen Xuejing's observation, at least in the Shanghai market, the acceptance of single coffee beans from Yunnan is not very high.

But just like cold coffee, Flat white-- Starbucks is called Frappy White-these coffee products are of the same quality, and when Starbucks starts to promote them, their awareness will increase immediately. Most of the time, when you hear an order from a customer in a boutique coffee shop, you will habitually refer to Flat white, a coffee making method from Australia, as Furebai.

Although boutique coffee practitioners tend to disdain large companies, in terms of business strategy, Starbucks will undoubtedly accelerate its reputation in the coffee market if it replicates this advantage of scale to Yunnan Pu'er boutique coffee.

But in addition to young people from big companies and boutique coffee brands who come to Pu'er who want to do a big job, there is a group of people who may be more able to influence the fate of Yunnan boutique coffee.

Dakaihe Village is located on the border of Pu'er and Xishuangbanna. This small village is also covered with coffee trees.

Hua Runmei came back here after graduating from college in 2015. Her father owns a coffee estate here. Hua Runmei is the youngest farmer in this village. She has personally experienced the development of fine coffee in Yunnan, but because of the lack of information, the fine beans planted by many farmers are not recognized by the market.

Hua Runmei is a young farmer in Yunnan.

"many buyers who come to the training just spread the technology and ignore the local actual situation, resulting in the beans being rejected because the quality is not up to standard. The other is that local farmers are confused by the high price of coffee and begin to produce it in large quantities, but there is no market connection. " "the boutique industry has indeed encountered all kinds of problems in Yunnan in the past two years," she told Interface News. "many farmers just look at it but don't dare to do it."

So Hua Runmei decided to learn the knowledge of fine coffee by herself, and then went down to coffee farms and factories to practice with the farmers. She is "one of her own", and local farmers are more likely to believe her and recognize the concept of boutique coffee. People call her "plum"-a name that is already well-known in the field of boutique coffee in Yunnan.

In Pu'er, the "second generation" with high ambition for boutique coffee began to emerge. They can try it on their farmland, know how to communicate with market practitioners through social networks, and understand that the "third coffee wave" will eventually bring a huge first-mover advantage to Yunnan coffee after it affects the Chinese market.

"the most important thing to promote Yunnan boutique coffee is the market demand, and then add a series of promotion and attention by some professional coffee training institutions in Pu'er and the government." "Young people are also important," she said. "We don't have difficulties in communicating with the outside world like our parents, and we have more channels to learn some new knowledge about coffee."