The World's 50 Best Bars have just been announced—and you can consider this your official bucket list of exceptional drinking dens around the world.
28.09.2023 - 14:09 / nationalgeographic.com
Like a finely brewed macchiato, roasting your own coffee beans is a layered affair. Standing at the bench of a makeshift mud-brick hut deep in northern Thailand’s fertile forests, coffee farmer Lo-Ue Jayo is about to guide me through my first coffee-making lesson using a 72-year-old Probatino roaster.
“You don’t need books to learn how to make good coffee,” says Lo-Ue encouragingly, his hazel eyes watching me intently as I crank the roaster by hand. “We learn how to roast by using all the senses: looking, listening, smelling. It’s like cooking.” Slowly and evenly, I turn the roaster’s handle to rotate the beans. I’m quickly greeted by a faint nutty aroma, which grows more robust as the beans churn inside the drum. Wispy white smoke begins to curl from the roaster’s small opening, followed by a popping sound that signals the beans are starting to caramelise.
When the popping stops, Lo-Ue’s broad, toothy smile appears and he nods with approval. Roasting is an artform, he tells me — one that requires practice to perfect the bean’s flavour profiles.
Lo-Ue should know. When he first established his Arabica coffee farm 14 years ago, he had no experience in growing or making coffee and wasn’t even a regular coffee drinker. He practised by roasting 100kg of the stout beans from scratch before eventually finding a recipe he liked. As he tells me about the history of his farm, Lo-Ue deftly transfers my beans to a bamboo pan, then tosses them in the air to cool, releasing plumes of smoke that hang over this patch of Suan Lahu land like a caffeinated cloud.
Tucked between the mountainous folds of Chiang Rai’s border in northern Thailand, with no public transport nearby, the organic coffee farm is tricky to reach. On our 90-minute drive here, the clamour of Chiang Mai’s markets was quickly replaced by rice paddies and roadside fruit stalls, the unfurling highland scenery occasionally punctured by the golden spires of Buddhist temples.
Now, over the grinding of beans, Lo-Ue tells me how these fertile hills are home to seven tribes and their complex, branching family subgroups. Some, like the Lawa, pre-date the formation of Thailand and are considered Indigenous, while others, like the Lahu and Hmong, migrated here from neighbouring countries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to escape oppression. Many people belonging to these groups are registered as stateless by the Thai government, and social and geographical isolation have allowed them to maintain their own distinctive cultures, languages and belief systems.
Lo-Ue counts himself among the Black Lahu, the dominant family in the Lahu community, who number around 60,000 in Thailand. Originally from the Tibetan plateau, the Black Lahu still maintain
The World's 50 Best Bars have just been announced—and you can consider this your official bucket list of exceptional drinking dens around the world.
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