DURING THE FIRST YEAR of his coffee tutelage, Wicha read everything about coffee he could find, starting with the book Patchanee loaned him. He found that the material written in Thai was contradictory, ill-informed, and poorly translated from English, German, or other languages. So he read most of the material in English. “It was very hard for me and took a long time, but I did it,” he said. Gradually, he learned about coffee—its history, cultivation, economics, and market. True to form, he immersed himself in his topic.
Coffee was first identified as a medicinal plant that grew wild on the mountainsides of Ethiopia, but no one knows exactly when or by whom. Of the various legends, the most appealing involves dancing goats. An Ethiopian goatherd named Kaldi allegedly noticed that his goats were behaving quite strangely, running about, butting one another, dancing on their hind legs, and bleating excitedly. The goats were chewing the glossy green leaves and red berries of a tree. Kaldi tried some of the berries himself. The fruit was mildly sweet, and the seeds that popped out were covered with a thick, tasty mucilage. Finally, he chewed the seeds themselves, but they were too hard, so he spit them out, then popped another berry in his mouth. Soon, according to legend, Kaldi was frisking with his goats. Poetry and song spilled out of him. He felt that he would never be tired or grouchy again.
There may be some truth to the story, since goats will eat almost anything and they do wander at will in the Ethiopian mountains. At any rate, coffee became an integral part of Ethiopian culture. By the time Rhazes, an Arabian physician, first mentioned coffee in print in the tenth century, the trees probably had been deliberately cultivated for hundreds of years. It is likely that, as in the legend, the coffee cherries and leaves were initially chewed, but the Ethiopians then learned to brew the leaves and berries with boiled water as a weak tea. They ground the beans and mixed them with animal fat for a quick energy snack. They made wine out of the fermented pulp and made a sweet beverage, kisher, out of the lightly roasted husks of the coffee cherry.
Finally, probably in the fifteenth century, someone roasted the beans. When roasted, they blew up to twice their size and turned brown, blackening if roasted too long. The Ethiopians ground these aromatic roasted beans and put them in hot water for a few minutes to make an infusion. Coffee as we know it had arrived.
Once the Ethiopians discovered coffee, it was only a matter of time before the drink spread through trade with the Arabs across the narrow band of the Red Sea. The Arab Sufi monks adopted coffee as a drink that would allow them to stay awake for midnight prayers more easily. Initially regarded as a medicine or religious aid, it soon slipped into everyday use. Wealthy people had a coffee room in their homes, reserved for social imbibing. Coffeehouses, known as kaveh kanes, then sprang up, allowing the less wealthy to indulge. By the end of the fifteenth century, Muslim pilgrims had introduced coffee throughout the Islamic world in Persia, Egypt, Turkey, and North Africa, making it a lucrative trade item.
As the drink grew in popularity throughout the sixteenth century, it also gained its reputation as a troublemaking brew. Various rulers decided that people were having too much fun in the coffeehouses. When Khair-Beg, the young governor of Mecca, discovered that satirical verses about him were emanating from the coffeehouses, he determined that coffee, like wine, must be outlawed by the Koran, and he persuaded his religious, legal, and medical advisors to agree. Thus, in 1511 the coffeehouses of Mecca were closed. The ban didn’t last long.
Coffee drinking prevailed partly because of its addictive nature, but also because coffee provided an intellectual stimulant, a pleasant way to feel increased energy without any apparent ill effects. Coffeehouses allowed people to get together for conversation, entertainment, and business, inspiring agreements, poetry, and irreverence in equal measure. The brew became so important in Turkey that a lack of sufficient coffee was an acceptable reason for a woman to seek a divorce.
The Arabs tried to maintain a monopoly on coffee cultivation by parboiling the seeds to make them infertile. But some time during the 1600s a Muslim pilgrim named Baba Budan smuggled seven fertile seeds out by taping them to his stomach and successfully cultivated them in southern India, in the mountains of Mysore. In 1616 the Dutch, who dominated the world’s shipping trade, managed to transport a tree to Holland from Aden. From its offspring the Dutch began growing coffee in Ceylon in 1658. In 1699 another Dutchman transplanted trees from Malabar to Java, followed by cultivation in Sumatra, Celebes, Timor, Bali, and other islands in the East Indies. For many years to come, the production of the Dutch East Indies determined the price of coffee in the world market.
Europeans eventually became enamored of the social and medicinal benefits of the Arabian drink. By the 1650s coffee was being sold by Italian street vendors. Venice’s first coffeehouse opened in 1683. Named for the drink it served, the caffè (spelled café elsewhere in Europe) quickly became synonymous with relaxed companionship, animated conversation, and tasty food. Even Britain welcomed coffee, although tea would later supplant it as the favored caffeinated beverage. By 1700, there were 2,000 coffeehouses in London alone, each specializing in its own clientele, and called “penny universities” because of the stimulating conversation to be had for the price of a cup of coffee. Some coffeehouses were for actors, others for writers, businessmen, or sailors.
It could be argued that coffeehouses affected European culture by helping to sober up its citizens. Until the late seventeenth century, alcoholic beverages were widely and heartily consumed, from breakfast until the nightcap at bedtime. Coffee contributed to the advent of modern science, commerce, and industry by making clear thought much more common. It also unquestionably helped to spawn revolutions. The American and French revolutions were both planned in coffeehouses, and many Americans switched from tea to coffee after the Boston Tea Party protest of 1773.
Coffee cultivation spread to the western hemisphere in the eighteenth century. In 1714 the Dutch gave a healthy coffee plant to the French government, and nine years later a French naval officer named Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu introduced coffee cultivation to the French colony of Martinique after nursing a coffee seedling during a perilous transatlantic voyage, later referring to “the infinite care that I was obliged to bestowe upon this delicate plant.” Once it finally set down roots in Martinique, the coffee tree flourished. From that single plant, much of the world’s current coffee supply probably derives.
In the early eighteenth century, coffee arrived in Brazil and made its way through Central America and Colombia. By 1750 the coffee tree grew on five continents. The semi-tropical arabica coffee plant grows best at an elevation of 3,000 to 6,000 feet in a girdle around the equator, between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, where the temperature never gets too hot or too cold, hovering around 75°F. The beautiful locations are also among the world’s poorest and most violence-prone areas—in part because of the way coffee, a labor-intensive crop, was grown.
UNFORTUNATELY, COFFEE BECAME associated with slavery and oppression. Slaves had initially been brought to the Caribbean to harvest sugarcane, and the history of sugar is intimately tied to that of coffee. Sugar made coffee palatable to many consumers and added a quick energy lift to the stimulus of caffeine. When the French colonists first grew coffee in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) in 1734, it was natural that they would require additional African slaves to work the plantations.
By 1788 Saint-Domingue supplied half of the world’s coffee. The slaves on the island lived in appalling conditions, housed in windowless huts, underfed, and overworked. They revolted in 1791 in a struggle for freedom that lasted twelve years, the only major successful slave revolt in history. Most plantations were burned to the ground and the owners massacred. Haitian coffee eventually reentered the international market, but it never regained its dominance.
The Dutch jumped into the breach to supply the coffee shortfall with Java beans. Though they did not routinely rape or torture their laborers, they did enslave them. In Brazil, slavery was not abolished until 1888, later than any other country in the western hemisphere, because of coffee. Although some Brazilian plantation owners treated their slaves decently, others felt free to do as they pleased. Slaves were regarded as subhuman, “forming a link in the chain of animated beings between ourselves and the various species of brute animals,” as one slaveholder explained to his son.
In Central America, the indigenous peoples such as Mayans were not technically enslaved, but the system of forced labor (mandamiento) and debt peonage amounted to the same thing. For a Mayan in Guatemala in the 1800s, for instance, the only alternative to being dragged off to work on a farm (or to the army or gang labor on a road) or to going into debt to a coffee farmer was flight. To maintain order, the government instituted a large standing army and militia. Thus, coffee money funded a repressive regime that fostered smoldering resentment among the indigenous people. Sometimes they rebelled, but such attempts only resulted in massacres. Instead they learned to subvert the system by working as little as possible, by taking wage advances from several farmers simultaneously, and by running away.
So, in the history of the coffee industry, oppression and poverty have been associated with coffee cultivation, and inequities remain embedded in the global coffee economy, with most of the profits made near the consuming end in wealthier countries, not in the countries where coffee is grown.
BY THE LATE nineteenth century, coffee had become a global, semi-industrialized industry. Green coffee beans from remote areas around the world arrived via steamships in major consuming countries in North America and Europe and were roasted in factories, then sold in branded packages. The ground canned coffee wasn’t great, since it had to be exposed to oxygen and pre-staled before packaging. Because freshly roasted coffee produces carbon dioxide, it cannot be put immediately into an airtight container—the releasing gas would cause a rupture. Still, the canned coffee was convenient and well advertised.
The market dominance of coffee from the East Indies was broken by a fungus, Hemileia vastatrix, the coffee leaf rust blight, which first appeared in Ceylon in 1869. It was called rust because of its initial yellow-brown stain on the underside of the coffee leaf, which eventually turns black, producing the spores of pale orange powder that rub off and spread. The blotches gradually enlarge until they cover the entire leaf, which then falls off. Finally, the entire tree is denuded and dies. The fungus effectively destroyed the coffee plantations of Indonesia for many years. Eventually, many farms in the East Indies began to grow robusta coffee (Coffea canephora), an inferior variety native to West Africa. It can withstand greater heat in the lowlands and is resistant to rust, but it has a harsher taste and contains twice the caffeine of arabica. Consequently, it has been used primarily in cheap blends, instant coffee and in many espresso blends to produce a foamy crema on top.
Various theories held that the coffee leaf rust was caused by the shade trees then in use, or that too much dampness encouraged the disease. It does appear that the fungus thrives in moist environments. The real villain, however, is monoculture. Whenever man intervenes and creates an artificial wealth of a particular plant, nature eventually finds a way to take advantage of this abundant food supply. The coffee tree is otherwise rather hardy.
The decline of coffee in Indonesia coincided with its explosive growth in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America. Three importers in the United States, a syndicate nicknamed the Trinity that had controlled the majority of the crop from the East Indies, struggled to keep coffee prices high, even as Brazil flooded the market with beans. Finally, in 1880, they were unable to maintain the artificial price, and the market fell disastrously. “There was no attempt to do business, everyone being suspicious of his neighbor,” recalled one veteran coffee man. The losses for coffee amounted to nearly $7 million in 1880.
In an attempt to stabilize the market, a coffee exchange was begun. Though complex in execution, a coffee exchange is a relatively simple concept. A buyer contracts with a seller to purchase a certain number of bags at a specified time in the future. As time goes by, the value of the contract changes, depending on market factors. Most real coffee men used the contracts as hedges against price changes, while speculators provided the necessary liquidity, since every contract requires a willing buyer and seller. While a speculator may profit, he also may lose his shirt. Essentially he provides a form of price risk insurance for coffee dealers.
But the C-market, as the exchange has come to be called, has not stabilized prices to any great extent, and various coffee quota schemes in subsequent years all failed as well. The crash of 1880 was the beginning of a boom-bust cycle that continues to this day.
WICHA LEARNED ALL of this rather disturbing history as he read and talked to Patchanee and her colleagues. And in 2001, the world was in the middle of the worst bust cycle ever experienced, due in large part to overproduction of cheap robusta in nearby Vietnam. Yet there was hope. He also learned about the specialty coffee revolution.
In the USA, by the 1960s, coffee had become a mediocre product, blended with inferior robusta beans, and served diluted in bottomless mugs to make it palatable. Per capita consumption declined, as baby boomers turned to soft drinks for their caffeine hit. In 1966, however, Alfred Peet, a Dutch immigrant and coffee trader dismayed by what had happened to his favorite beverage in the United States, opened Peet’s Coffee and Tea in Berkeley, California. He soon had a cult following for his dark-roasted single-origin arabica beans. This was the start of what came to be called the specialty coffee movement.
Throughout the country a scattered, disparate band rediscovered or maintained a tradition of fresh-roasted, quality coffees. Many had roots in small, old-style family coffee businesses. Others were hippies who had hitchhiked through Europe and discovered the relaxed pleasures of café life and decent coffee. In 1971, three such men, inspired by Peet’s, founded Starbucks Coffee in Seattle. It was just one of many such grassroots roasters. Starbucks eventually came to dominate the new specialty movement, although some critics complained that the chain was too big, slick, and standardized. Nonetheless, Starbucks was astonishingly effective at reintroducing coffee as a high-end product, similar to wine in terms of its terroir—the unique taste that results from a particular microclimate and type of plant.
At the same time, consumers became more aware of the inequities built into the coffee system, where the laborers who did the hardest work often received the lowest pay. In November 1988, Max Havelaar Quality Mark coffee was introduced in the Netherlands. Taking its name from the 1860 Dutch novel that protested the inhumane treatment of Javanese coffee growers, this Fair Trade coffee garnered enormous publicity and grabbed a small but significant market share. Within a few years, the Max Havelaar seal had appeared in Switzerland, Belgium, Denmark, and France. In Germany, Austria, the US, Canada, Japan, and other countries, where the Dutch name did not resonate, it became Transfair or Fair Trade coffee.
The bureaucratic headquarters moved to Bonn, Germany, and the Fair Trade Labeling Organization (FLO), was established, later renamed Fairtrade International. In order to qualify for Fair Trade status, farmers had to own only a few acres, join together in a democratically run cooperative, and pass an annual audit. In return, beans labeled Fair Trade were guaranteed a minimum selling price set somewhat above the C-market—if they could find a market for them. Critics of Fair Trade pointed out that its certification did not cover well-intentioned estates that treated workers well, because by definition they were too large. As a result, the US organization split off from FLO in 2011 in order to redefine the guidelines and accept larger farms. Regardless, Fair Trade beans came to represent an important principle: people should be concerned about the farmers who were producing the product they drank every morning.
BY THE TURN of the twenty-first century, the specialty revolution had spread around the world, including the Pacific Rim. Starbucks opened its first store in Tokyo in 1995 and in Bangkok in 1998. While mostly tourists were attracted to upscale cafés at the onset, the coffeehouses also became trendy, hip destinations for businessmen and young Thai, for whom they symbolized one of the good things in life appreciated by Western culture.
Arabica coffee cultivation had been introduced to Thailand in 1954, when the Thai Department of Agriculture brought in several varietal lines from Brazil, but they suffered from leaf rust. In 1961, Baptist agricultural missionary Richard Mann gave the Karen tribe of Huey Haum village in Mae Hong Son Province enough Caturra and Catuai coffee hybrid seedlings for commercial production. Although more tolerant of the fungal blight, they were still affected by it. Huey Haum farmers were able to sell their beans for a small profit and so continued to grow coffee. Mann worked with UN crop replacement programs for the next two decades, encouraging coffee cultivation along with other fruits and vegetables.
In 1991, Richard Mann’s son, Mike, also a Baptist agronomist and missionary, started the Lahu Irrigation Project in Chiang Mai, which soon expanded into the Integrated Tribal Development Program (ITDP). “At first we focused on family gardens, latrines, water supply and irrigation, and a few crops, including fruit, coffee and macadamia trees,” Mann recalled. “But we didn’t do any marketing, and we weren’t thinking that coffee would take off as a cash crop.”
That changed in 1997, when Richard Mann notified his son that a Japanese Christian organization, the Wakachiai Foundation, was interested in helping hill tribes market their coffee. With funding from Wakachiai, Mann organized a coffee cooperative, the Thai Tribal Arabica Coffee Production and Marketing Cooperative, and, using the foundation’s connections, got the first Fair Trade certification in Thailand through Transfair Japan. The first few villages Mann recruited included Huey Haum, as well as Goshen and Payang, two villages on the mountain of Doi Tung in the north of Thailand near the Burmese border. By the next year, two dozen villages had joined the cooperative, which sold beans to Japan and the Netherlands.
That Doi Tung villages were growing coffee was thanks to King Bhumibol’s aging mother. A Bangkok slum orphan who became a nurse and married a king, Princess Sangwal Mahidol, known as the Princess Mother, had a long-standing concern for the hill tribes. She had established a program for medical volunteers, landing with them in remote villages in helicopters, which earned her the nickname Mae Fah Luang—Royal Mother from the Sky—among the tribes. She had also helped sell tribal crafts in Bangkok.
The Princess Mother used to visit Switzerland every year for a ski trip. When she could no longer do so, she identified Doi Tung, which she had visited with her volunteer doctors, as an alternative vacation spot. The Doi Tung Royal Villa was built there, but she also wanted to help reforest the area and relieve tribal poverty. Thus began the Doi Tung Development Project under the direction of the Mae Fah Luang Foundation. Three Akha and Lahu villages had to relocate nearby, but otherwise the villages in the area were able to remain where they were.
The Princess Mother died in 1995, around the time that Nestlé, the Swiss-based largest coffee roaster in the world, donated coffee seedlings to the project. A coffee expert from the Kona region of Hawaii was hired to help launch the project. At first, the Mae Fah Luang Foundation tried to grow and market coffee on government-owned plantations, but things worked better when farmers owned their own trees (though they didn’t own the land). Doi Tung eventually became a well-known Thai coffee brand, sold in Doi Tung coffeeshops in Bangkok, Chiang Mai, and Chiang Rai.
BY 2001, WHEN Wicha focused on it as the possible salvation for the village of Doi Chang, coffee was becoming more popular in tea-drinking Thailand. He thought how great it would be if he could help position Doi Chang as the premier source of top-notch coffee in Thailand, produced and roasted inside Thailand. Not one to limit his vision, Wicha concluded that the name Doi Chang would come to stand for quality coffee and for the Akha tribe. In 2001, he made a research trip to Italy, home of espresso. At the Thai Embassy, an employee told him, “Oh, you must see my friend Chai in Bangkok.” So Wicha sought out Phitsanuchai Kaewphichai, a consultant to hotels and restaurants, who became “Brother Phitsanu,” a friend and advisor to Wicha, though he consistently turned down Wicha’s repeated offers to take an official position in the new business.
Wicha’s vision continued to grow. Not only would the Akha grow superior coffee, eventually, the beans would become as well known and sought after worldwide as Hawaiian Kona and Jamaica Blue Mountain beans. The Akha would not be subservient peons working for others. They would not be like the coffee slaves of the past. They would take charge of their own coffee, their own destiny.
Wicha now lived much of the time in a small thatched hut built for him in Doi Chang, as he and the Akha created their coffee enterprise. His wife and children, down in Chiang Rai, missed him, but they had grown used to his long absences.
Discussing his vision with Adel, Miga, Lipi, Akong, and the other young Akha, Wicha waxed lyrical, and his enthusiasm was catching. The Akha could do this! They were hard workers. They just needed to know the right way to do things. First, they needed a name. That didn’t take long. They would call their coffee Doi Chaang, adding an “a” to the village name to make it distinctive and to imply that the coffee was of double-A quality. It was also common for the Thai to double vowels to indicate that the syllable would be drawn out, pronounced “Doy ChAAHng.” Wicha and the small band of Akha registered the Doi Chaang Coffee Company Original on March 11, 2003.
On the package they decided to put a line drawing of Adel’s father, Piko, wearing a traditional turban. Piko looked like a respected elder statesman, with his rugged, handsome features and the determined set of his mouth. It was appropriate to honor him, because he had stuck with coffee after most other farmers had given up on the crop. The Akha were still an egalitarian society, but Piko was nonetheless pleased at this honor.
The next problem concerned how the coffee would be grown. Wicha hated the chemical pesticides and fertilizers that the Akha had been sold to grow vegetables, because such products put them into an endless cycle of debt and harmed their health and the environment. The chemicals also flowed in water down the mountain and affected other villages. He wanted the Akha to grow organic coffee. Patchanee taught them to plant taller shade trees among the coffee plants not only to provide the shade required to allow the beans to develop properly, but also to “fix” nitrogen by taking it from the air and converting it to ammonium to enrich the soil. The falling leaves from the trees would provide humus, and many of them, such as macadamia or banana trees, were themselves cash crops.
The coffee had to be carefully harvested, with only the ripest red or yellow cherries picked, and then processed that same day or the next. Patchanee emphasized that the wet process method generally yielded superior, reliable results with fewer defects, producing a drink with bright acidity and full, clean flavor. It is also far more labor-intensive and requires sophisticated machinery and infrastructure and an abundant supply of fresh running water at each processing facility. The springs on the mountain above Doi Chang provided plenty of water, but there was obviously no processing machinery.
Consequently, the Akha initially pursued the wet process by hand. They removed the skin from the ripe coffee cherries with a mortar and pestle, then put the pulp-covered beans in a bucket full of water to ferment for up to forty-eight hours, checking them frequently, since it was important to stop the process at just the right point to prevent over-fermentation. As the mucilage decomposed, it loosened from its sticky binding on the parchment. The process also gave a subtle flavor to the inner bean. Then the farmers took the beans, still covered in parchment, and spread them out to dry in the sun on clean surfaces (some farmers built small bamboo platforms), turning them every few hours. They threw out any beans that were cracked or discolored.
Wicha drove the dried beans to Chiang Mai, where a small coffee business removed the parchment and roasted the beans in a machine that held only one kilogram (half a pound) at a time. When properly roasted and brewed, the beans made superb coffee—a sweet, balanced cup, with a hint of roasted almonds, chocolate, and jasmine, and a syrupy-smooth mouthfeel. In terms of balance and versatility, the Doi Chaang offerings were comparable to the best Kona or Costa Rican beans, and they could be roasted medium or dark for different characteristics. The small Chiang Mai roaster wanted more, although its roasting methods were uneven.
The hand processing was inefficient, so with the initial coffee profits and loans from friends, Wicha bought a small depulping machine. It could run by hand crank or electricity provided by a generator or truck engine, and in an hour it could process 200 kilograms (around 440 pounds) of coffee cherries.
Wicha carried 5 kilograms (11 pounds) of roasted coffee everywhere he went—Chiang Rai, Chiang Mai, Bangkok. Before going into a retail store or coffeeshop, he threw the beans into cheap paper bags with the Doi Chaang Coffee label glued on them. “Please just test this coffee. If you like it, I will send you some every month,” he promised. He began to build a market for Doi Chaang Coffee. Even with Phitsanu’s encouragement and advice, however, Wicha’s attempts to help get the village beans into upscale hotels failed. The Doi Chang beans were superior, but the Chiang Mai roaster produced an uneven quality, and the packaging was amateurish. Hotels preferred Boncafe, a well-run company that leased espresso machines and provided Thai blends. It became clear that the Akha needed to roast their own beans and put them in well-designed, professional-looking bags.
WICHA WANTED TO borrow a small roasting machine, but he couldn’t get permission from the Thai Food and Drug Administration (FDA Thailand) to roast. “I got mad,” he recalled. He filled out the FDA paperwork but decided that he would go ahead and find a used roaster, assuming that the FDA would either approve the project by the time he managed to find a roaster and get it up the mountain, or approve a fait accompli. So he asked everyone he knew to help find a big, cheap, used roaster. He wanted one large enough to handle all the business he had so optimistically assured the Akha they would secure.
In the meantime, the Akha hired a backhoe to flatten the land they had purchased up the hill from Doi Chang village. With the money from the coffee they sold, they bought cement blocks and concrete to build a small warehouse, where they could store beans and later house their own roasting machine. “People thought we were out of our minds,” Adel recalled. Akong and Lipi, Adel’s young nephew, made multiple trips to the lowlands to bring back building materials one pickup load at a time.
Patchanee explained how best to nurture seedlings, prune trees, pick only the ripest cherries, and process them using the wet method. She told them how to dry the beans on concrete patios. She brought other professors and engineers to advise on constructing a processing station, with its diverted flow of water and holding tanks. The Akha then began to build a small processing facility. They constructed several adjacent vats where the freshly pulped beans could first be washed (the unripe beans floated off) and then transferred to a fermenting vat to complete the wet process. They poured a concrete slab to serve as a drying patio.
The villagers were intrigued but mystified by all this activity. Why were Wicha, Adel, and their group doing all this construction when they would never sell coffee for much money? “They called us the Crazies,” Adel said. “We had no electricity up there, nothing.”
As they were building the small processing facility, Phitsanu called Wicha to tell him that his business partner, Khun Pisan, had an antique German-built coffee roaster in a warehouse in Korat, in northeastern Thailand, that he might want to look at. Pisan had bought it five years earlier at an auction, but his plans for it fell through, so it was just sitting there. When Wicha saw the rusting hulk, he was enchanted. “I want it in Doi Chang,” he told Phitasanu and Pisan.
Doi Chang village had electricity from lines run from a substation down the mountain, but the transformer was not high capacity, since little current was needed. Still, Wicha figured there would be enough power for the roaster if they ran a line up from the village. But first he needed to get the huge roaster from Korat to the top of this remote Thai mountain in one piece.
It turned out that he couldn’t. Instead, it had to come up the mountain in many pieces. Pisan accompanied the 6-ton roaster on a semi-trailer to Mae Suai, the city at the bottom of the mountain, along with his friends Poom and Yut. Then Wicha, Pisan, and the others, referring to the German-language manual that none could read, disassembled it, piece by piece. It took a convoy of sixteen pickup trucks to get the roaster up the mountain to Doi Chang in July 2003, at the height of the rainy season. Pisan slipped and fell down the mountain, breaking his leg, ending up in the hospital. He refused to return to the project, but he arranged for an Australian engineer to come help.
It took over a month for Akong, Adel, Wicha, and others to put the roaster together again inside the small concrete block enclosure they had built for it. Anuchit, an Akha who had worked as a mechanic in Chiang Rai on rice processing machinery, was particularly helpful. “Every time there was a problem,” Wicha recalled, “we had to call someone else for advice, and when we were missing a piece, even a small screw, we had to go back to Chiang Rai or Bangkok to get the piece.” Yut recalled that he thought Wicha was obsessed with a wild, unworkable idea. Nonetheless, he helped fix a faulty starter ignition. “We had to find a Bangkok machinist to make a new part,” he said.
Finally, after the machine was assembled and a line had run electricity up to the building above Doi Chang village, the grand day arrived when they were to fire up the roaster. Hundreds of villagers assembled, dressed in their traditional Akha costumes, to watch as the vintage machine roared to life. As it did, it blew all the lights in the village. Wicha poured in a bag of beans and adjusted the air intake. Ingang, Ausgung, which one should he pull? Instead of limiting the airflow, he ended up maximizing it. The machine overheated and set fire to the beans. Smoke billowed, choking everyone in the small building. They unplugged the roaster, rushing to throw buckets of water on it.
They eventually learned how to make the roaster work, and with a new transformer they got sufficient electrical power without interrupting service to the village. Akong became the master roaster, adjusting the temperature, finding that it worked best around 200°C (392°F). That gave the beans a slow, even roast in about seventeen minutes. Patchanee wasn’t surprised. “After seeing how hardworking and focused they were, I knew they would succeed.”
In 2003, the Akha processed 7 tons of coffee beans. Most were sold as green beans to traders, but now that they could roast their own beans, sales to lowland coffeehouses grew steadily. Following Patchanee’s advice, they had begun to cultivate seedlings and plant them to replace tomatoes and cabbages, along with shade trees to protect the coffee trees from direct sun. They used no chemical fertilizers or pesticides. The 200 acres of original trees had now swelled to several thousand acres, and for the first time in many years, the sound of birdsong returned to the hills of Doi Chang.
That same year, in February 2003, Wicha and the Akha opened their first small Doi Chaang Coffeehouse in Chiang Rai. It had four tables and was run by Wicha’s wife, Nuch, with help from Akha youngsters and her own children after school. They faced a steep learning curve, and so did their customers. “When we first started,” Wicha’s daughter Kwan remembered, “there were few coffeehouses in Chiang Rai, and people were used to paying 7 baht for Thai-style coffee with condensed milk and lots of sugar. We were selling a small espresso for 50 baht, and no one knew what we meant when we talked about real arabica coffee.” On opening day, they gave away free drinks, but people said they tasted too strong and bitter.
Over time, however, people began to appreciate the Doi Chaang beans for their high quality, especially when the espresso was used as the base for cappuccinos and lattes. Wicha brought in a Korean barista to teach them how to make beautiful designs in the milk atop the coffee drinks. Farang tourists were excited to find good coffee so far from home, and many of them came behind the counter to offer tips on how to tamp and draw espresso and steam milk properly. Nuch and her children also learned to bake scrumptious coconut, chocolate, and espresso cakes and to make passion fruit, mango, vanilla, strawberry, and coffee ice cream to accompany the coffee.
As 2003 progressed, the whirlwind of activity made it clear to Wicha that he needed help. He was good at starting new enterprises, but he was a visionary, not a details man. Someone needed to keep the books and handle correspondence. Since most Akha were illiterate—with no written language, literacy had rarely been an issue for them—that posed a problem. Then he thought of Miga, Adel’s younger sister, who had just returned to China, where she was studying Mandarin.
Miga, then twenty-eight, was the youngest of seven surviving siblings and the only one in her family to attend a university, near Chiang Rai, where she earned a degree in accounting. In 1998 she had gone to China on vacation, where she had been cheated out of her money because she didn’t understand the language. Taking that as a challenge, she went back to China to study Mandarin.
In August 2003, Wicha called her back, after she had paid her non-refundable tuition and school was about to begin. She returned to Doi Chang just in time to see the German roaster engulfed in flames. “There was no office,” she recalled, “and there were no files.” She began to put some order into the stacks of paper Wicha handed her, as she sat in her father’s house in the village, surrounded by piles of coffee bags. “We had no money. Every baht we made was put back into improvements. But the company really had nothing at that time. Where would we get money from? Not from Wicha—just look at him!” she said, referring to her scrawny, somewhat disheveled mentor. “But I had to believe in him. I really had no choice, he was the leader.”
When asked when she knew that the business would succeed, Miga could not identify a turning point. “It wasn’t something I ever thought about. We just processed, roasted, transported, and sold coffee. There were seven of us, working all day. I never thought about where it was going. We just had to show everyone we were working hard.”
Soon afterward, they opened a small Doi Chaang coffeeshop near the roaster on the mountaintop to educate themselves and villagers about the taste of their own coffee, to impress potential buyers, and to sell to the occasional tourist. “We didn’t know how to make coffee. We didn’t start from zero, we started from somewhere negative,” Miga said. As happened in the Chiang Rai shop, the kindness of interested strangers gave them a boost. Dr. Joanna Critchly, a Scottish coffee-loving philosopher who was backpacking around Thailand, stayed with them for a few weeks and gave them tutorials in brewing methods. She also told them about the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) and its emphasis on quality.
Meanwhile, at the end of 2003, Wicha opened the Doi Chaang Coffee House in Bangkok, an elegant affair that also served as an office. There he and Phitsanu drew up business plans, met buyers, and developed operating procedures for other coffeehouses they planned to open.
By 2004, optimism and coffee momentum were growing in Doi Chang, and not just from Wicha’s efforts. Mike Mann’s Integrated Tribal Development Program (ITDP) had reached the village in 2002, when he facilitated the formation of an Akha coffee cooperative with other local farmers, helped them with an irrigation project, and sold some of their beans to Japan. Then Mann decided that if Starbucks was operating coffeehouses in Thailand, why weren’t they sourcing beans there as well? He persuaded the American chain to test samples from ten villages. Five types of beans, including beans from Doi Chang, were chosen to be included in a Starbucks blend called Muan Jai, which means “wholehearted happiness.” In September 2003, when the blend was introduced, a few traditionally clad farmers from Doi Chang and Huey Haum were brought to Bangkok for photo ops. Mann considered this exploitation, but it helped put Doi Chang on the coffee map.
IN MARCH 2004, Kornkranok “Sandra” Bunmusik, the owner of a competing coffeehouse in Bangkok, met Wicha at a food exhibition. This meeting would have a dramatic impact on Doi Chaang Coffee. As a child, Sandra, whose father was a Thai government bureaucrat, had moved every few years as he was shifted to a new post. She learned to adapt and make new friends quickly and also became adept at learning new dialects and languages. At Khon Kaen University in northeastern Thailand, she majored in English but also studied Buddhism, which became an important part of her life. After graduation, secretarial work in a furniture factory bored her, but she then became a well-paid executive at a large insurance firm. That led in 1997 to an MBA program in the United States at Western Michigan University. “I planned to work in development administration with UNICEF,” she said.
While studying, Sandra discovered the joys of specialty coffee at Starbucks and other coffeehouses. “In Thailand, I had drunk instant Nescafé with tons of sugar and milk. I had never had really good coffee, and in the USA I learned to love it.” When she returned to Thailand in 2000, she decided that at thirty-five maybe she was too old to start at UNICEF or another development agency, and besides, she had fallen in love with coffee. She opened her own small coffeeshop in Bangkok. While she had been in the United States, Starbucks had opened its first Thai outlet, and now a few other independent cafés were also opening in Bangkok. With a four-person staff, Sandra was open from early morning until 9 p.m., serving three simple meals along with the coffee. She got her single blend from Aroma, a city roaster. “I had no idea where the beans came from, and I had never seen coffee growing,” she recalled.
Then she and a friend attended a business exhibit, where she had a booth to sell her coffee. While she minded the booth, her friend, who had been walking around, came running back. “Sandra! You’ve got to go see this guy. He’s selling coffee grown in Thailand, and he says it’s the best in the world.” Leaving the booth with her friend, Sandra went to see for herself. “Just try it!” the little man with the scraggly beard was saying. “You’ll see. Doi Chaang Coffee is the best.” Sandra sampled a cup. It was indeed superb. Entranced, she listened as Wicha told the story of the poverty-stricken Akha, how Adel had come to him, asking for help, and the extraordinary transformation that the village was undergoing. “You should visit, you’ll see,” he said.
The next month, Sandra flew to Chiang Rai with a friend and rented a truck. It took five hours to drive up the muddy road from Chiang Rai to Doi Chang. “If he had told me what it would be like to get up there, I wouldn’t have come.” She arrived, exhausted, at 7 p.m. Wicha and the Akha had had no idea they were coming (there was no cell phone reception in those days), but they made the newcomers welcome as best they could. They sat around a campfire, talking and gazing up at the stars, then slept in a small hut on the floor, covered by a blanket. Sandra wasn’t used to bugs crawling on her and didn’t get much sleep, but in the morning, she loved the mountain views and the glossy green leaves of the coffee trees, and she was impressed with the old German roaster and processing facility. The Akha were friendly and enthusiastic. She knew she would return.
Back in Bangkok, Sandra switched from Aroma to Doi Chaang Coffee. Wicha gave her advice on how to make good coffee, how to draw the best shots of espresso, and how to make lovely latte art with steamed milk on top. In 2006, he asked her to join Doi Chaang Coffee to help him expand sales and marketing in Thailand. Wicha was boundlessly and infectiously optimistic and ambitious. Sandra eventually closed her own coffeeshop to devote herself full-time to Doi Chaang.
Wicha was still not content, though, despite how well things were going. He wanted to export Doi Chaang beans. He wanted them to be recognized throughout the world. But how?