A regular cup of coffee might not conjure notes of strawberry, Jolly Ranchers or blueberry jam. But at Belfast’s Lucid Coffee Roasters, owner Stephen Houston’s coffees do just that. He’s part of a growing cohort of cafes and roasters in Ireland highlighting mesmerising coffees. Namely, Chinese coffees.
To the casual coffee drinker, this might sound unremarkable. From inside the coffee industry, though, this could raise eyebrows. The Los Angeles Times reported in 2023 that Chinese coffee is on the uptick in the US, China itself only leaning into fancy coffee production since the 1980s. Now that craze is catching on in Ireland, too.
Smack dab in the middle of downtown Cork, Three Fools Coffee’s tiny shop sells not one, not two, but three coffees from China. Dublin’s Cloud Picker Coffee sells a simple white box of Chinese beans for €14. Even so, these coffees are still rare, oddities to coffee drinkers rather than typical fare.
That’s because it’s still somewhat rare in Yunnan, the province where in “the extreme south”, according to Britannica, coffee can be grown. In the region’s best coffees, tastes can be floral and sweet. Blackberry, pecan, and grape can show up in the flavour descriptors, too. Chinese farmers are now developing these fine coffees rather than just mass-produced, commodity-grade stuff. Coffee Intelligence reported in 2022 that coffee exports from the province had “jumped by more than 1000 per cent” since 2002.
Yunnan is no exception to issues facing any growing region, such as maintaining consistent high-level quality. Gaining mainstream recognition in the face of the larger markets can be hard. But when tasting Chinese coffees, almost everyone is pleasantly surprised by Yunnan beans, says Houston. “People say ‘Coffee from China? What?’” Houston says. “I tell them to leave inhibitions outside and just drink it.”
Houston came to coffee a decade ago, moving up at Belfast’s Bailies Coffee Roasters from driving deliveries to head roaster within his seven-year stint. Now he boasts numerous accolades: winner of the 2017 Irish Brewer’s Cup, third place in 2018, first again in 2019, second in 2023, and current Irish AeroPress Champion. In 2021 he launched Lucid, soon after the birth of his first child and feeling a need to continue pioneering.
Platforming lesser-known coffees, including Chinese, while making sure these rarer coffees are approachable for even a casual drinker can be tricky. He tries to prioritise flavours such as chocolate in low-acid roasts. Headier coffees are on the roster, too. He agrees it has just been in the last few years that Asian coffees have made it to Ireland – it’s the second year he has bought them in and, he adds, it’s not pricing that makes Chinese coffees attractive. Two coffees he bought from Yunnan were more expensive than his other offerings. London-based Nomad Coffee underscores the pricing. In 2023, the company’s transparency report found Nomad paid $3.57 per pound for a coffee from producer Yalan Li in Yunnan. In comparison, the average commodity-grade coffee in 2023 went for $1.74 per pound while Nomad paid on average $6.20 for Colombian beans. The company purchased just one Chinese coffee lot against 13 from Colombia.
Shirani Guna and Christian Steenberg deeply understand Chinese coffees’ It Girl moment. The two run Indochina Coffee, an importing business that supplies Lucid and about 10 other Irish coffee businesses. They’re considered the first to import speciality Chinese coffees to the UK and Ireland. Guna and Steenberg got into this work after cutting their teeth in Thai, Myanmar and Chinese international development. In northern Thailand, coffee emerged as a replacement to opium poppy farming. Through this project they met regional projects Yunnan Coffee Traders and Torch Coffee and took the plunge into their own entrepreneurship.
They say the Chinese government has pushed coffee development in the region since the 1980s, particularly to multinational buyers Nestlé and Starbucks. They say 2016 was a turning point toward the introduction of speciality coffees in Ireland and the UK, when producers saw a market niche outside behemoth buyers. By developing a better product and finding buyers, Chinese farmers can earn a higher price than selling low-grade coffees to the larger players.
The duo also find China’s image in customers’ minds – including even Chinese customers – is clouded by tea. Chinese coffee has been growing for years, but now higher quality varietals such as Geisha, the coffee world’s most celebrated type, come from the country’s tea farmers, too.
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Those innovations have shown up not just from countries including Ireland as new buyers, but also as the domestic market expands. Coffee Intelligence, again, found Chinese coffee consumption is up 15 per cent, and coffee publication Standart Magazine finds Shanghai as the city with the most coffee shops in the world. “A lot of people don’t see China as agricultural,” Guna says. “They think of Beijing, not Yunnan.”
There’s an uglier reason why Chinese coffees might be less commonly available than others: coloniality. Guna says sinophobia runs rampant through commodity importing of all stripes. Commercial coffee blew up historically alongside seafaring capital expansion; the Dutch brought the bean to Indonesia, the Spanish to Mexico, the British to east Africa, and so on. Coffee is no exception to the bloodstained histories bracing numerous exports, but China – as well as other Asian powerhouses including Russia and Japan – more or less resisted those invading marketeers. “There’s a reason Brazil and Kenya produce so many of these coffees,” Steenberg says. “China never had that.”
Though recent years have seen Chinese coffee enter the Republic, it’s certainly still an outlier. Irish coffee professional Susie Kealy, who works in digital marketing when not penning guides on where to get espresso in Dublin, says she has yet to order one in-country. She’s originally from Dublin, but lived in Berlin for seven years while working at trendsetting cafe The Barn. While there she saw a lot of Chinese coffees, but she has seen few in Ireland. Kealy says the reason is simple: in Ireland, the speciality coffee scene is a few years behind other parts of the coffee-consuming world. “Tea leaves run through our blood,” Kealy says. “Americans, Starbucks and TV [have] influenced Ireland over the years. In the last 20 years coffee has blown up.”
She hears from some cafes that it’s not worth it to try to convince regulars of farther-flung coffees, including Chinese. Blends are popular in Ireland, so Chinese coffees are more likely to sneak through that way. Kealy points to Dublin’s Sumo Coffee Roasters, led by Daniel Horbat, who was a World Cup Taster champion in 2019, as an example. Colombia and Brazil get recognition, almost like buzz words, on the supermarket aisle or at coffee shops – trying something new can be hard. “There’s no history behind Chinese coffee,” Kealy says.
Still, China is poised to keep gaining. As a burgeoning trend in Ireland, its eclectic, fruity regional flavour profile is being determined by coffee pros in the area. Shirani Guna travelled to a “Yunnan Coffee Flavour Map” event in October, the fourth of its kind. Almost 800 coffee graders drink coffee from across the region and chart the flavours found as a group. It’s co-ordinated by Torch, producers and importers collaborating to paint a fuller picture for consumers. “It’s hard to produce clean, washed coffees at volume,” Christian Steenberg says. “You’re starting to see that coming out of Yunnan now.”
Just last year Stephen Houston hosted Indochina Coffee to cup these coffees in Belfast, earning plenty of new converts. “Ireland’s a small country. People get used to the same things,” Houston says. “But speciality coffee should be broad, something different. The quality is absolutely staggering in these last few years.”
