LAOS - LA'S JAVA HONEY

Espresso Roast

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A BIT ABOUT THIS COFFEE

We’re incredibly happy to welcome back La’s coffee. Each year we receive her Java variety, and it remains one we’re always excited to share.

La’s coffee consistently stands out for its unique flavour profile, carrying the signature sweetness we’ve come to love in Lao coffees—something that keeps drawing us back to explore the region’s hidden gems.

Her home, Nong Kali, is a peaceful and picturesque village of lush, rolling hills, where small coffee plots sit beneath natural forest canopy. Red dirt roads—shared by livestock and motorbikes alike—wind between traditional homes, connecting a community producing some of the most distinctive arabica in Laos.

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WHY YOU'LL LOVE IT

This coffee has a beautiful natural balance, with gentle sweetness and soft fruit notes carried by a rounded base of caramel and honey.

These flavours intertwine to create a cup that is both vibrant and mellow, with a silky texture and a smooth, lingering finish. Perfect as a black espresso.

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HOW TO BREW

20g dose

47g yield

25-27 seconds 

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THE STORY

La specialises in washed and honey-processed coffees, sundried on raised beds in the scenic outskirts of Nong Kali. She cultivates small plots of Java, Catimor, and Typica varieties, surrounded by native forests, and processes each batch individually.

This special lot comes from fully ripe Java cherries grown on La's farm. After harvesting, the cherries were floated to remove any defects, then carefully pulped, similar to her washed process. Instead of fermenting to remove the fruit layer (mucilage), as done in a fully washed process, La leaves the sticky-sweet mucilage on the parchment and dries the coffee slowly on raised beds. This traditional honey process brings out a uniquely defined and sweet character that showcases Arabica from the Nong Kali region beautifully.

Coffee has been farmed here for more than 60 years, with the majority of farms in the area being small, family-managed coffee gardens which are most often shade-grown and organic. It's a slow pace of life here, and a scenically beautiful one at that.

We’ve been sourcing coffee from Nong Kali since 2020. As with all of our Lao coffees, we purchase dried parchment directly from individual families, enabling them to focus on what they do best: farming and processing the best coffee they can. This way, farmers don’t have to worry about dry-milling, sorting, bagging, transport or the complexities related to export. They also set their own price and can better account for their total costs. It’s substantially more involvement and effort for us, but it’s a model that we are proud to say is the most mutually beneficial here. 

Coffee was first brought to the Bolaven plateau a little over a century ago by the French. They introduced Bourbon and Typica varieties (some of these heirlooms can still be found in a handful of villages). The departure of the French and the subsequent Vietnam War completely decimated the industry, and it has slowly recovered over the past couple of decades.

Today, the Plateau is home to a growing industry, including some smaller specialty-focused operations, as the conditions for producing arabica here are perfect. A cooler stable climate with good rainfall, fertile volcanic soil and lots of natural forest cover are some of the conditions in favour of arabica production here. 

The coffee varieties that are mainly grown today are Catimor, Catuai, Caturra, Java, and Typica. Demand for Lao coffee is now at an all-time high.