Kyauk Ku Pyin (Myanmar)

Artwork Credit: Sam Landsberg

We recommend this coffee served as an opulent espresso beverage, drip coffee or single cup pour-over.

Kyauk Ku Pyin is a remote mountain community outside the town of Ywangan, Shan State, Myanmar. This community has been producing coffee for more than 100 years! The residents here take extreme pride in everything, from their attention to detail in farming and production down to keeping their streets and homes as clean as possible. Kyauk Ku Pyin used to sell their entire crop each year to Blue Bottle, and we’re happy that’s not the case anymore. And a good chunk of their proceeds go towards funding local education. Ywangan, a town in the southern Shan State, Myanmar has become - in just the past six years - the epicenter for specialty coffee in Burma. The families of this community do their own farming, harvesting and processing; they then export the coffee through Shwe Taung Thu, a local organization we have been working with for four years now. Warm daytime temps and cool nights help this coffee to ripen slowly and develop sweetness and a soft acidity. They intercrop their coffee with vegetable and fruit trees and prune the coffee plants to match their height. The harvested coffee is meticulously dried on raised beds for 15-28 days. This drying process - which uses almost no water - yields much brighter fruit notes. We like to call it the “wine drinker’s coffee” and is ideal for the more adventurous coffee enthusiast.

We have centered our coffee sourcing around these small communities in northern Myanmar every since we opened in 2019, and we are one of a small handful of spcecialty coffee roasters in the US to do so. This is our fifth year partnering with them! Every year we offer a few of these community lots; and we are proud to be a longtime partner with Shwe Taung Thu, Atlas Coffee Importers and all the community members that make these coffees so special.