If you know me well, you know that I am quite the coffee snob. I am religious about my coffee routines in the morning when I am at home. I grind my beans fresh, and delight in the robust smells of my French Press brewing as I get ready for classes. My coffee is always just the way I like it. You can tell by the way I am even writing about this little routine of mine now that aside from friendships, this may be the biggest thing I miss. ANYWAYS, last week I had an experience that every coffee connoisseur dreams of.
Our comparative study took us up to Chiang Mai and the into the hills north of Chiang Mai to meet and spend a few nights with the Pogonyor tribe, a subset of the Karen Hill Tribe. I knew the villagers were farmers, many of them living a simple life of subsistence farming and selling any leftovers. However, little did I know that they also grew coffee.
We drove up the winding roads for two hours to get to the village, and arrived mid-morning. The air was cool and the sky was blue and the plants were lusciously green—a nice change from down in the lowlands in Chiang Mai where they are burning their crops and everything is dry and lifeless. We were actually at a high enough elevation that there were pine trees. The Pah that was hosting us welcomed us with a coffee feast, if there ever were such a thing. He had a bag of beans sitting on the table. I nibbled on one—immediate cure to my caffeine headache. Pah ground the beans, put heaps of them in a filter over a pitcher and methodically poured water over the ground beans. Comforting smells of rich, robust black coffee, right from the source wafted up towards my face. I felt as though I was at our family cabin in the Cascade Mountains in Washington State. The combination of the smell of pine and the smell of dark coffee brought me back to summer mornings spent there. This was paradise. A pour over coffee, traditionally one of the most hipster drinks you can buy in America, was being brought back to it’s roots. Actually though. I was physically standing under the coffee tree the beans had come from.
Noticing my joy and delight over this little experience we were having, Pah picked the coffee cherry, the fruit that the bean derives from, off of the tree and allowed me to smell it. Then he led me around the side of the house and showed me where he roasts the beans. I was expecting a massive roasting machine like there are in the US. I hadn’t even imagined other ways one could roast the coffee plant. But we turn the corner, and he motions to this little pot on the ground, that essentially a Thai wood burning stove. He then pulled out a contraption that sat on top of it; a small barrel with open ends and a crank on the side that he put the beans in over the fire. Turning and turning them to roast each batch, which would have probably filled three or four bags to sell. Handmade coffee. I was in awe. I will never see coffee the same again.