A Lincang cooperative learning to pulp its own coffee

The cherries had been weighed twice before we arrived, and Li Xianhua was weighing them a third time when we came through the gate. He was crouched beside a blue plastic crate at the edge of the courtyard in Bangmai village, about an hour southwest of Lincang town, and he was tipping handfuls of red and yellow fruit onto a small spring scale that had been borrowed, we learned later, from the village clinic. The scale read in grams. The crate held forty-one kilos. He wrote the number on the side of the crate with a permanent marker, in characters that ran slightly downhill, and then he stood up and shook our hands without wiping his.

The cooperative is called Bangmai Shanyu, mountain rain, and it was registered in 2019 by seven families who had grown coffee on the slopes above the village for almost twenty years without ever processing a bean themselves. Until then the cherries had been sold whole, at the farm gate, to a buyer who drove up from Pu'er twice a week in a small flatbed truck and paid by the kilo at a price set somewhere we could not see. In 2019 the price collapsed. The families met in the courtyard of the village committee, drew up an agreement on two sheets of lined paper, and decided that the next season they would try to pulp their own fruit.

Li Xianhua is forty-six and the elected head of the cooperative. He grew up on this slope when it was planted in Yunnan large-leaf tea, the same broad-leaf variety that goes into Pu'er, and his family still keeps four mu of old bushes on the southern face. The coffee came later, in the early 2000s, when a county extension officer arrived with seedlings of Catimor and a leaflet about cash crops. The families planted the new bushes between the tea rows. For years the two crops grew alongside each other and the family income arrived in two separate envelopes, one in autumn, one in late winter, neither quite enough on its own.

The pulper sits in a low concrete shed behind the tea drying floor, a hand-cranked Penagos imported through a wholesaler in Kunming and bought, secondhand, for what Li said was equivalent to six months of the cooperative's tea sales. It is painted red and it is bolted to a frame his cousin welded from rebar. On the morning we arrived, three women from neighbouring households were feeding cherries into the hopper one careful handful at a time, watching the skins peel away and the pale seeds drop into a bucket of water below.

“The fermentation tank is a glazed clay jar of the kind that holds pickled mustard greens in every kitchen in the county.”

What is interesting about Bangmai Shanyu is that the families are not coming to coffee from nothing. They are coming to it from tea, and they are bringing the habits of tea with them. The cherries are sorted by colour on a bamboo tray, the same tray the family uses to wither tea leaf in April. The fermentation tank is a glazed clay jar of the kind that holds pickled mustard greens in every kitchen in the county. The drying beds are raised on bamboo legs at the height of an adult's thigh, which is the height a Yunnan farmer instinctively builds anything that needs air underneath it.

Li keeps a notebook for the coffee in the same way his father kept one for the tea. He has been doing this for four seasons. The entries record the date of picking, the brix reading from a small refractometer the cooperative bought together, the weight of the cherries, the start time of fermentation, the ambient temperature at the shed door, and the pH of the wash water drawn from the spring above the village. He showed us the 2024 book over tea. The handwriting was small and the margins were full of small revisions, arrows from one number to another, a circled note that said the second tank smelled wrong on day two.

The fermentation is where the cooperative is still arguing with itself. The buyer who took the first year's lots, a roaster from Shanghai who drove down in person, asked for a twenty-four hour wet ferment, washed clean, sun-dried on the raised beds. The buyer the year after that asked for a seventy-two hour anaerobic ferment in sealed plastic drums with the mucilage left on. A specialty agent who came through last spring suggested a honey process, mucilage half-removed, dried slow under shade cloth. Li has tried all three. The notebook has separate sections for each, with cupping scores written in the margin in another person's hand.

What we sat with for the better part of two days was the question of which of these methods belongs here. Bangmai is at fourteen hundred metres. The mornings are cold, the afternoons humid, the slope drops away east toward the Lancang river. The Catimor bushes are old enough now to have settled into their roots. A method that works for a farm in Baoshan, two hundred kilometres north, does not automatically transfer. The cooperative is in its fifth season and is still finding the window in which its own cherries reward attention. Li said this without anxiety. He said the tea took his father eighteen years to read properly.

On the second afternoon we walked up the slope with Li's daughter, Li Mengyao, who is twenty-eight and has come back from a logistics job in Kunming to manage the cooperative's accounts and its small Taobao shop. She walked us along a row where coffee and tea grow in alternating bands, the dark glossy tea leaves at waist height and the lighter coffee leaves above them, and she pointed out which bushes had been picked that morning and which were waiting another four days. The pickers, she said, work the rows by colour, not by row, taking only cherries that have gone fully red and leaving the rest for a second pass.

Back at the shed, the morning's pulped seeds had been moved into the clay jar and the jar had been lidded with a damp cloth weighted by a flat river stone. Li lifted the cloth, leaned in, smelled the surface for perhaps four seconds, lowered the cloth again, and made a small mark in the notebook. We asked what he was checking. He said the smell on the second morning will tell him whether he has another twelve hours or another thirty. He could not yet explain in words which smell meant which. The jar would tell him tomorrow. He set the stone back on the cloth and went to find his daughter, who was already weighing the afternoon crate.