Introducing The Wild Card
Green Land Natural from Myanmar
Taking a job as the new coffee buyer at a 40-year-old business was a little daunting to begin with. My job is to protect quality and steward the coffee offering into a new phase of growth. This means preserving the long-established and loyal customer base who I've learned are dyed-in-the-wool fans of our staple house blends, while also diversifying the product range in a way that will bring the brand to a new audience of specialty coffee drinkers.
Don't change too much, take your time and don't scare anyone, would be a rational approach. And with this I did the opposite. Perhaps you would call it the move-fast-and-break-stuff approach, but then new land was never discovered by playing it safe. My job is also to challenge, to question, to encourage the curious and I'm fortunate in that I'm being trusted enough to be adventurous, and maybe even a little mischievous.
Enter a naturally processed coffee from northern Sumatra. Now there's a sentence I bet you didn't expect. Introducing, the Myanmar Green Land, or as I like to call it, The Wild Card.
Why Wild?
Well, firstly, Sumatran coffee in the Third Wave specialty scene has, let's say, been rather under sung. That is, associated with a flavour profile that could be considered the opposite of what chasers of high-quality look for. Which is coffees that are, in a nutshell, sweet, juicy and clean. Sumatran coffee is characteristically none of those. It’s heavy bodied, earthy and usually roasted dark. Lovers of Sumatran coffee will tell you this is exactly why they love it. When people talk about rocket fuel coffee, they're almost always talking about Sumatran.
To confuse things even more, it's a naturally processed coffee, which are generally marmite - you either love or hate. Lovers love them because the process causes a predominantly sweet and fruity profile, haters for exactly that reason - they don't want their coffee to taste overly sweet.
Hang on, what's naturally processed mean anyway?
Unlike the washed method, where the sticky pulp and mucilage of the cherry is fully removed before the beans are fermented and then washed with water before sun-drying, the natural method leaves the whole picked cherry intact during fermentation and drying. This encourages the beans inside the cherry to absorb more of the fruit's sugars. The result is often heavy, fruit-forward, complex flavours.
So, onto Green Land itself...
Rooted in the Hills of Pyin Oo Lwin
It comes from the highlands of Pyin Oo Lwin, a scenic town in eastern Myanmar known for its botanical gardens. Founded in 1999 by U Sai Wan Maing after selling his rubber plantation, Green Land Coffee has grown into one of the country's largest and most pioneering coffee farms.
Set at 1,150 masl on the Shan plateau—part of the Indo-Malayan mountain system—the farm flourishes among erythrina trees that dot the landscape with vibrant orange-red blossoms and enrich the soil with nitrogen. These conditions are ideal for nurturing exceptional coffee.
Big Vision, Bigger Growth
What began as just 30 acres quickly expanded to over 450 acres, now home to more than 580,000 coffee trees. The main variety is a Costa Rican Catimor (locally called “Costa Rica”), while SL34 makes up about 10% of the farm. U Sai Wan continues to explore the potential of Yellow Bourbon, Caturra, and Catuai to diversify and improve cup quality.
Community in Every Cup
Green Land supports a dedicated team of around 15 full-time workers, scaling up to 100 during harvest. Most days, you’ll find about 50 people tending the farm. While the estate has its own wet and dry mills, they often collaborate with exporter Mandalay Coffee Group for higher-spec processing facilities to ensure top quality.
My brewing suggestion
This coffee is sweet, juicy and clean, but with an earthy, spicy backdrop.... yet it's also fruity, delicate and lingering. It is the epitome of a coffee with great structure and complexity. I genuinely think it's a jammy summer brew yet would be equally great as a Christmas coffee because it's almost a little mulled-wine-like, dare I say a little decadent.
While I believe all our coffees should be roasted to perform across a range of brewing methods, I have found that this coffee, because of its complexity shines best as black filter coffee. It really doesn't matter whether you're a V60 or an AeroPress user or you just want to throw it in your batch brewer. Just go with a coarse grind, use filtered water and brew at a ratio of 1:18. (E.g. 14 grams to 250ml of water for a mug, or 28 grams for half a litre if sharing. Your brew time should be between 3-4 minutes.)
Myanmar has long been underrepresented in the specialty coffee scene, and I'm proud to be delivering our first coffee from this small country to our customers in collaboration with long-term supply chain partners DR Wakefield. It could well be divisive but I'm confident it will surprise and delight, especially amongst black coffee drinkers who aren't adverse to a little acidity. Either way I hope it will challenge perception of coffee flavours more generally and bring some exposure to this pioneering coffee region.
Be quick to brew this microlot. Available as 250g & 1kg. Whole Bean or ground to order
