Roasting August 25th ONLY! (8oz Bags)
White Label Vietnam Dung K’No Smallholders Washed
Tasting Notes: rice pudding, cardamom pod, milky mouthfeel, nutmeg finish
August and September White Label coffees allow us to both showcase coffees from a country we've not featured before and to highlight how dramatically wet vs dry processing can produce divergent flavor profiles even within the same cultivar grown on the same farms picked during the same harvest.
Long before becoming the world’s largest producer of robusta coffee, Vietnam began coffee cultivation with the planting of an arabica tree in the north of the country by French Catholic missionaries the mid 1800s. The small amount of coffee produced in Vietnam continued to be dominated by arabica until the French began commercial production of robusta coffee in the 1920’s in the country’s Central Highlands where climate and soil are ideal for large-scale robusta plantations. Civil conflicts and wars of liberation throughout most of the 20th century kept commercial coffee exports modest until the economic reforms of the late 1980s led to exponential growth in cultivation in the 1990s. Today, Vietnam is second to only Brazil in overall coffee production and exports.
Aside from a small amount of arabica still produced in the north, most of Vietnam’s traceable specialty coffee hails from a mountainous section in the Lam Dong province in the southern part of the Central Highlands where high altitude, cool temperatures and rich basalt volcanic soil known locally as “Basan Red” produce an environment ideal for the slow, even development of arabica cherries resulting in sweeter, more refined coffees.
Our coffee hails from the Dung K’No village in this mountainous part of Lam Dong province where around 180 smallholder family farms of the K’No people grow the hearty catimor cultivar on small single hectare lots interspersed with other subsistence crops grown for personal consumption.
For August White Label we are roasting a low-intervention, fully washed iteration of Dung K’No to present the coffee in its most transparent form. In addition to enjoying a lovely, refined cup, this will give us a frame of reference to compare the very same coffee in its dry-processed form next month. We found the striking difference in cup character quite illuminating.
In the cup, Washed Dung K’No conjures a flavor I’d not encountered before in a coffee—that of rice pudding. It presents subtly at first but swells toward the end of the second stage, coming into sharper focus as the cup cools. The delicately sweet milky flavor and palate-coating mouthfeel are there, highlighted with hints of the exotic floral/citric quality of green cardamom pod. Mild lactic acidity provides a slight kick to a medium body that carries secondary flavors of vanilla bean and oolong tea, finishing with muted spice notes of nutmeg and more recessively, cinnamon.
Cultivars: Catimor
Region: Lam Dong
Farm: Dung K’Nosmallholders
Altitude: 5,000 feet
Processing: Fully washed