South of the Clouds

Last fall I watched a CNA Correspondent piece called Coffee's Rise in China. It traces the country going from instant-Nescafé territory to having one of the densest cafe scenes in Asia, with Luckin and Cotti undercutting each other on price every few weeks. Coffee culture in China, fully arrived.

The question I couldn't shake after watching wasn't about cafes, though. China is clearly drinking coffee now, but are they also growing it? Specialty-grade, the kind that shows up next to Ethiopia and Colombia on a serious roaster's menu? Is this a new wave?

I should say upfront that I'm deep into coffee. There are too many pour-over drippers in our kitchen. The freezer has roasted beans from places I haven't gotten around to brewing yet, vacuum-sealed in single doses to keep them at peak. Coffee turned into a real passion somewhere along the way, and then into something closer to obsession. Nancy and I are both Chinese. We'd never had Chinese coffee. Almost no American specialty drinker has either. That gap felt like ours to bridge.

So I started reading. Then I started watching more.

It turns out there's a region in southwestern China called Yunnan (the name means "south of the clouds"), growing arabica at the same latitude as Yirgacheffe in Ethiopia. A French missionary planted the first trees in the 1890s. Nestlé arrived in the 1980s and turned it into commodity supply for instant. For thirty years that's basically what it was. Then, in the last decade, something shifted. The 24/25 harvest in Menglian, one of the main growing regions, hit a 62% premium bean rate. Over 16,000 households in that one prefecture now grow coffee as a specialty crop, not as bulk. A real origin emerging at scale, and almost no one in the US is drinking it yet.

I bought my first Yunnan greens from Burman Coffee Traders in Madison, Wisconsin, who source through a small importer in Pu'er called Torch Coffee. Two lots: the first was Menglian Red Honey, a honey-processed Catimor. Clean, sweet, a little citric upfront, a hint of red fruit and chocolate. The second was Black Sheep, a double anaerobic natural that ferments for thirty days in sealed tanks. Opening the bag, the first thing you notice is the smell. Wine. Fermented red fruit, oak, rum raisin, Mexican chocolate. The kind of coffee where the first line in any honest review is always either "this is the wildest thing I've ever brewed" or "my wife hates it." I started thinking I'd found my thing.

So Nancy and I tried to go deeper. She emailed exporters in Yunnan directly, looking for samples. Producers, cooperatives, anyone who would respond. There were a lot of polite replies. There was a lot of back and forth including WeChat messages, time-zone gymnastics, a few weeks of cautious optimism. Ultimately, nothing arrived. Not one sample bag. The infrastructure for exporting Yunnan green to a garage in San Jose just isn't there yet.

Around the same time, my roasts of the Red Honey kept going sideways in small, frustrating ways. Yunnan beans roast differently; they want a slower middle and a higher drop temp than washed Ethiopians. The honey lot was forgiving enough to land good cups, just not amazing ones. And Black Sheep, the harder of the two, is the kind of anaerobic that takes real practice to nail. "Good, but not amazing" is the worst possible outcome for a coffee you're trying to build a roastery around.

So the Yunnan-only thesis quietly fell apart. Not all at once. Just one piece at a time, until I was sitting with the realization that I'd been trying to force something the universe was clearly not handing me.

What I'd actually fallen for wasn't Yunnan specifically. It was the unfamiliar. A coffee almost no one in the US has had, from a culture we knew something about. Underneath that, a wider pull. I wanted to drink coffees I hadn't tried before, from places most Americans haven't been. Yunnan was a specific answer to a more interesting question: what if every month, you got to taste something new, that someone you trust had picked out for you on purpose?

That's where Folio came from. Yunnan specialist became monthly curation. Same impulse, broader scope. Each issue features a coffee or two we've chosen because they taught us something. The story of the producer, the process, what made us pick it. We picked it on purpose. We'll tell you why.

Issue Nº 01 had to be the Yunnan coffees. They're the reason this exists. Next month, we're somewhere else. We don't know where yet. That's part of the point.

— JM
San Jose, May 2026