Coffee - Desperately Trendy

 

Marcia and Ratana in our Mae Sariang kitchen
in 1985. Not roasting coffee at the moment but
they figured out the system for us.

The missionaries we’ve known loved what they were doing and loved the people they were doing it with. Not many would have said they weren’t enjoying their life and their mission. That seems Biblical to me. Jesus said He came so we could have life and have it abundantly and we were following Him. We weren’t getting particularly rich, but I wouldn’t trade our mission career for anything. It was an abundant life! So, while there seems to be a school of thought that missionaries are sacrificing and “suffering for Jesus”, I am not a proponent.

That being said, drinking coffee in Thailand in 1982 was a sacrifice that honestly, caused ‘suffering’. Starbucks was not yet even a twinkle in the eye of Howard Schultz. He wouldn’t begin taking coffee nationwide in the US until after he bought the company in 1987. A Swedish friend once told us the Swedes had a term for lukewarm, weak, lousy coffee. They called it “church coffee”. Starbucks however, seemed to make good, robust, full-flavored coffee popular which eventually spread even to Thailand. But in 1982, Thailand’s focus was on tea and coffee was an afterthought. Way after! Even “church coffee” was a treat and impossible to find.

In the post about the first train ride to Chiang Mai I described the morning coffee on the train. While the train coffee was particularly bad, coffee was bad everywhere. Order coffee in a restaurant large or small and the cook would reach for a jar of instant coffee, probably from Nestle. Into a small cup or glass would be dumped a heaping Asian soup spoonful or two of instant coffee topped with an equal amount of sweetened condensed milk. Hot (maybe) water would be added to dissolve the instant coffee and slightly dilute the condensed milk and the bittersweet sludge was ready to be served. We didn’t care for it. Can you tell?

Asking for black coffee with no sweetened condensed milk was unheard of and would produce a quizzical look followed by several questions for clarification such as:

Server: So….. you just want the coffee in a cup?    Me: Yes

Server: So …. you don’t want any sweetened condensed milk?       Me: No

Server: So ….. just coffee?  (Pause) Do you want water too?       Me: Yes, hot water and coffee, both in the same cup.

Server: So, just coffee and water?      Me: Yes

Server: Shrugs and walks away thinking, “Crazy farang (westerner).  How can he drink that?”

Not a very good example of a coffee tree but a good
example of Rupert Nelson coaching Karen in
Nya Su Glow Village - 1985

Of course, we could, and did buy our own instant coffee for use at home and could make coffee however we liked. Unfortunately, instant coffee always comes out tasting like instant coffee. We longed for the experience only “real” coffee could provide.

The ground coffee scene wasn’t much better. We remember a brand called Tung Who (though I’m not completely sure I have the spelling right). Tung Who coffee was available in grocery stores in Bangkok and we would buy it and use it, but it really just represented our desperation for anything coffee-like. It was roasted extremely dark and bitter and wasn’t much, if any, better than the instant coffee. Even the upscale hotels did not have good coffee. Thailand was a coffee desert!

 

In 1985 we took a trip to Japan where it was confirmed we were being deprived of good coffee in Thailand. We could not walk past a coffee shop in Japan. We had to stop. The coffee was absolutely great and smelled even better. They seemed to have the siphon system down to perfection. Whatever they had, we not only wanted it, but needed it! Returning to Thailand, we would not be denied!

Green coffee berries - Tee Mu Lay
Village 1986 

Our coffee fortunes began to change though, after we moved to Mae Sariang in August/September of 1984. Dick Mann and Rupert Nelson, Bob and Pat Coats and others had been working in the Mae Sariang area for decades and had good relationships established with a number of villages. Some of these villages were already growing good quality coffee plants, could process it well and had good, unroasted beans. Some were even starting to roast and grind (usually pound in a mortar and pestle) their own coffee beans.

Unfortunately though, the only coffee they had ever seen was instant coffee. So, when they made coffee in the village, they’d just take those great smelling grounds and dump them straight into the cup with hot water. After stirring it around the liquid didn’t taste too bad, but there were an awful lot of grounds to deal with, especially on the bottom. It seemed we wound up having to chew much of what was in our coffee cup. Rupert and Dick and others would do their best to get our Karen hosts to boil and filter the grounds, do a pour over style coffee or whatever but, change doesn’t happen overnight.

The big problem with growing coffee in the 1980s was that there was no real established market. Small quantities could be sold in Chiang Mai but nothing was really available for larger quantities. From the buyers view point, there wasn’t yet enough coffee being grown to warrant setting up a real market so it was at an awkward stage. No market because of limited supply and no supply because of a limited market. So, some of our early work was trucking Karen grown coffee into Chiang Mai to sell it.

We could also buy the dried, but unroasted beans directly from growers to use at home. It was a win-win as we wanted good coffee and the growers needed to sell their beans. The challenge though, was that we needed to roast and grind the coffee so we could use it in our imported, US style drip coffee maker. That was something new as far as we were concerned.

Marcia worked together with Ratana who worked as a housekeeper and cook for us. They soon came to the conclusion that dry roasting the coffee beans in a wok on our gas stove would suffice for roasting. The trick is to know when they were “done”. Under-roasting resulted in weaker coffee but then of course, some might like that “church coffee” flavor. Over roasting resulted in too dark and bitter a roast. So, there was an art to getting the roast done to our taste. Once roasted, we’d grind it up and put it in the coffee maker and finally, we had decent coffee.

Swedes of course, are famous for good coffee and we were working with Swedish projects. So we had a

Loading up seedlings to head to the villages.
Mae Sariang - 1980s

fair number of Swedish visitors coming to Mae Sariang that we would host. We had one memorable group of visitors to our house and we made dinner for them. We were still new to roasting coffee but we knew we had to have plenty of good, strong coffee ready to serve as anyone from Sweden would be expecting it. So, we roasted up a good batch of coffee beans but uh-oh, we were sure we’d roasted them too dark. The coffee was going to be too strong and bitter and we’d have no credibility as Swedish hosts. But there was no time to do anything else so we had to go with it. Finally, the coffee was poured and people were beginning to have a sip or two. We were just getting ready to apologize for our over roasted coffee beans when one of the guests gave a happy shout saying, “Ah!! Swedish Coffee!!“We kept our apologies to ourselves.

So, we got into buying raw coffee beans, roasting and grinding our own coffee in the mid 1980s. By the time we went back to the US in mid-1987, US coffee culture was starting to catch on. We’d gotten into coffee roasting out of desperation for decent coffee and had no idea we were being trendy and maybe even ahead of the curve of a new trend in the US.