CHINA BANKA

Recommended Retail Price: £13/250g

Tasting Notes: Soft, sweet and clean with jammy blackberry, honey and a coating mouthfeel.

Region: Yunnan Province
Altitude: 1350 masl
Variety: Catimor
Process: Natural

Since it made its debut on our shelves in 2021 coffee from Banka washing station has been a favourite among Steampunk customers. We’ve had both washed and natural lots from this unique and developing origin and this year we decided to go with their natural processed lot. We love the way its punchy fruitiness pairs with its rich mouthfeel. 

Banka washing station is based in Yunnan, southern China and is named after the two villages around which the coffee cherry for these lots was grown and harvested: Banka Yi and Banka Er. Steampunk bought this coffee from Indochina importers, a small family-run business specialising in coffee from China, Myanmar, India, Philippines and Thailand. Indochina co-founders Shirani and Christian work with the folks at Yunnan Coffee Traders (YTC) to export this coffee from China. 

As a pioneer in the Chinese specialty coffee industry in Yunnan, YCT operates farming, mill, research and training facilities. In 2018 YCT took over management of Banka Washing Station and a portion of Banka Farm, some 100 hectares of land. They installed one of the region’s first optical sorters and began experimenting with processing methods such as yeast fermentation and growing new varieties like Pacamara and Yellow Bourbon. Their most recent development has been the introduction of parabolic dryers on the patios to make better use of solar radiation as well as protect the drying coffee from rain, something that is happening more often during the harvest period. 

The coffee is grown and picked by smallholder farmers predominantly from the Lahu minority community. They farm the land around their villages and the coffee trees are intercropped with other plants including tea, avocado and macadamia nuts. The growers sell their cherry to YCT, bringing it directly to the wet mill for payment. The wet mill is run by Mr. Saam and Ms. Ye Gat who live onsite and manage all aspects of mill operations, including a small group of seasonal staff who also live on site. 

Steampunk has begun collecting more specific information on the prices farmers are paid for the coffee we buy. The tiny team at Indochina got back to me straight away when I contacted them. Cofounder, Shirani Gunawardena, told me, “[The price paid to producers] is hugely dependent on the local context as well as other factors such as the goals of the producers themselves. Certainly for all of the producers we are working with, the cost of production and/or living incomes are part of the pricing structure.” This is in contrast to some importers working in more established origins, many of whom use the coffee C price as a baseline to calculate how much they pay producers, regardless of the cost of production. The topic of how green coffee is priced is a complicated one, not least because coffee is produced in so many different places under such different economic circumstances.

We’re likely to see more Chinese coffee on the specialty market as investment in the sector grows. This year Indochina will be taking part in the Yunnan Coffee Flavour Map event which brings 700 coffee tasting professionals together to blind taste 400 coffees with an aim to collect cupping data to understand the flavour profiles of Yunnan Coffee. Run in tandem with the a coffee festival, the project has some both big name sponsors (Nestle, Melita) and sponsors with ties to the speciality industry (Stronghold, Coffee Quality Institute). From our perspective, it’ll be interesting to find out more about the flavour possibilities of Chinese coffee.

Coffee was first planted in China by French missionaries in the 1800s, but it wasn’t until the 1980s that cultivation on a commercial scale began as part of a government-led project assisted by the United Nations Development Program and the World Bank. The focus on specialty coffee is relatively recent, with the past decade seeing smaller coffee farms and producers improving their knowledge and skills to produce better quality coffee like this one.

Yunnan province is mountainous with fertile land. Almost all of China’s coffee production happens in Yunnan and over half of this production is concentrated around Pu’er, a region famous for its centuries-old tradition of tea production. The people of Yunnan are a hugely diverse mix of different cultures and languages, with most of China’s officially recognised 56 different ethnic groups residing there. It’s not just diverse in terms of its people either, the region also boasts a vast array of flora and fauna (including elephants and tigers), snow-capped mountains, deep valleys, vast plateaus, subtropical jungles, beautiful lakes and majestic rivers, including the mighty Mekong.