Our first issue, and a coffee almost no American specialty drinker has tried: two Yunnan micro-lots, a clean red honey and a wild double-anaerobic natural.
Never miss the next one. Folio Reserve is one 250g bag every month, $26 shipped or $22 San Jose pickup.
Yunnan sits at the same latitude as Yirgacheffe, and a French missionary planted the first trees in the 1890s. We wanted to know what it tastes like now.
Two coffees, one set. Menglian Red Honey: clean and sweet, citric up front, red fruit and cocoa, a soft chocolate finish. Black Sheep: wine on the nose, oak, rum raisin, Mexican chocolate. A loud one.
Both from Yunnan, the region whose name means south of the clouds. Menglian and Ximeng, Catimor, grown at 1,100 to 1,600 meters. Chinese specialty coffee, which almost no American drinker has tasted.
The inaugural Folio. Two 80g bags to a set, hand-numbered, sold as a pair so you could taste the range in a single sitting.
Last fall I watched a piece on coffee’s rise in China, and the question that stuck wasn’t about cafés. China is clearly drinking coffee now, but is it growing the specialty kind that shows up next to Ethiopia and Colombia? Nancy and I are both Chinese, and we’d never had Chinese coffee. Almost no American specialty drinker has. That gap felt like ours to bridge. It turns out there’s a region in southwestern China called Yunnan, which means south of the clouds, growing arabica at the same latitude as Yirgacheffe. A French missionary planted the first trees in the 1890s, and Nestlé turned it into instant in the 1980s. Only in the last decade did specialty arrive. So we made it our first issue: two micro-lots, side by side, to taste what Yunnan can do.
Every issue, held for you.
One freshly roasted 250g bag every month. Reserve your copy before the public drop and skip the monthly checkout.
Folio is the two of us, roasting in San Jose and bagging it together. One coffee a month, picked because we were curious about it. Roasted in small batches, and sent out with an essay that tells you why. That's the whole story. We'd rather do one thing well each month than fill a shelf you have to sort through.
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