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Doi Saket

Doi Saket is the oldest coffee growing area in Thailand, located in Chiang Mai province. The first few trees of Arabica coffee that were part of the opium replacement program of the Thai King were tested here. As a result, heirloom varietals, particularly Typica, are still commonplace in many old farms. The area is also a strict protected forest because it is next to a big city, Chiang Mai, meaning the national forest department and the police can reach it easier. Doi Saket is the epitome of shade grown coffee farms. Typica trees are grown under a forest with many micro mills each producing about one ton of green beans per year.

Recently, there has been an effort to introduce rust resistant and higher yield Arabica hybrids at Doi Saket’s coffee farms. This Side Up sees the importance of bringing these existing Typica beans to international market because it could demonstrate to the farmers that there are people who appreciate and are willing to pay more for the heirloom cultivar to compensate for the lower yield. In some sense, this effort could be called “Operation Saving Heirlooms.” 

Unlike Doi Pangkhon (another coffee This Side Up is offering from Thailand) whose inhabitants are Akha hill tribe, Doi Saket’s villagers are of Thai descent, meaning they typically integrated better with the Thai society and the Thai state has been better at providing them with social welfares. Doi Saket’s farmers grow coffee from the altitude of 1000-1500 masl, but Beanspire selected only coffee beans from 1300+ masl for our lot. Coffee at Doi Saket is processed using a traditional fully washed method. Coffee cherries are pulped at micro wet mills at each farming family’s home and then dried on raised bamboo beds. The parchment is then hulled, size sorted, density sorted and hand sorted. In the next seasons, we will be experimenting with other processing techniques to explore the limits of Thai coffee.

Through our partnership with Beanspire Coffee, a group of young Thai specialty coffee believers who have been working with farmers in Thailand to improve the quality of coffee, This Side Up works with a cooperative at Doi Saket that is headed by a progressive village head, Mr. Opp, who wants to see the quality of Doi Saket’s coffee improves. Mr. Opp hopes Doi Saket’s coffee will be roasted by those who appreciate the hard work of his village members. Mr. Opp knows that connecting his village members to the specialty market will help improve the standards of the coffee from his village. This is both Beanspire’s and This Side Up’s first season of working with Mr. Opp and we have high hopes for the future coffee from Doi Saket!

In 2017, Beanspire and Doi Saket worked together very intensively to create some incredible microlots which we decided to sell by the kilo because they are so rare. Here are the details of the processing of the fully washed, honey and natural lots that we imported for the 2017 season. 

Fully washed lot:  made up of 5 small scale farmers. Fermented for 24 hours and then soaked for 24 hours more. The coffee is dried on bamboo-raised beds for 14-21 days. The parchment went through multiple sorting machines (size and density) and lastly hand-sorted.

Honey washed experiment: sorted again after selective picking. pulped and dry fermented for 12 hours to partially remove the mucilage before drying the parchment on raised beds. Removed the mucilage for about 50%, hence much of the mucilage still remained, producing parchment that is red in color. The parchment is dried very thin and raked by hand frequently to prevent further fermentation. Parchment was sorted to take out any defect during the drying process as well.

Natural experiment: First, ripe cherries picked in the morning and began the processing right away to avoid unwanted fermentation. Second, hand-sorted only coffee cherries to select only perfectly ripe ones. Third, the cherries were samples to make sure that their Brix values are higher than 22. Fourth, cherries floated to remove any defective coffee beans. Fifth, laid the cherries on raised beds in a single layer and minimised the cherries touching each other to ensure even moisture and lack of unwanted fermentation. Sixth, dried the coffee in a green house in a controlled environment. The drying was carefully monitored over 3 weeks and we continued to pick out defective cherries until the moisture of the cherries reached 10%. 

In 2018, next to the successful processing experiments of 2017, Beanspire and Doi Saket cooperated on a new experimental semi washed process: They partially fermented the coffee for 12 hours, cleaned the wet parchment, but left a trace of mucilage on the parchment with hope that it would produce a clean cup and good acidity like the washed process, but also add interesting characteristics, particularly the sweetness and body, which are more common in honey processed coffee than washed. In other words, it's a half-way process between a fully washed and a honey. After the parchment is dried on raised beds to a desired moisture level for 21-25 days, we then cured the coffee for two more months before milling and the green is further rested for a few months until it is exported. Although in the next few years no new processes were created, existing processes were assessed and tweaked, especially the semi-washed lot. The idea of this coffee was to explore the possibility of creating cleaner, but complex coffee.

In recent times, Beanspire and Doi Saket have been experimenting with new processes and developed the Double Anaerobic Honey and Sparking Natural.