Itinerary
8:30 am Depart from Lifelong Learning Payap Center
9:00 am Arrive at the Mae Jo cherry processing facility. Our guide, Richard Mann, will explain the different wet milling processes that
they use, as well as some new processes that they are developing. Cherry pulping and drying will be available to see.
10:30 am– Head to Lanna Café and the /Integrated Tribal Development Foundation warehouse and office in San Phi Sua
10:45 am – Tour the dry mill facilities (hulling, grading, and roasting) followed by experiencing “cupping” – a tasting to test the quality
of coffee and find the unique characteristics of each type of coffee. Richard will introduce us to 3-4 different types of coffees/
processes. He will explain the difference in flavors and how the different processes influence those flavors.
12:15 am – depart for Lifelong Learning Center
The Back Story on Lanna Coffee (adapted from the Lanna Coffee website)
Lanna Coffee’s roots go back to 1961 when Richard Mann began introducing Caturra and Catuai coffee hybrid seedlings to rural villages in the Thai highlands. With his program being widely successful, the United Nations recruited Richard to head an opium eradication project that ultimately ended opium production by providing a viable replacement – coffee. During the time that Richard was working in the opium eradication project, his son Mike spent a lot of time with his father in villages, learning about their way of life and the problems they faced. Eventually, Mike decided to use this knowledge and experience to continue his father’s work by founding the Integrated Tribal Developmet Foundation (IDTF).
Established in 1990, ITDF is an organizatrion committed to improving the lives of poor hill tribe communities “in many aspects of life, including clean water, sanitation, agriculture, education, health, and cash crops.” It created a project that would become the first fair trade certified coffee co-op in Thailand. The objective was to take coffee farming to the next level by producing a coffee that could reach international standards and, in turn, provide more money and opportunity for poor ethnic farmers. IDTF provides proper training, improved coffee varieties that can thrive in the hills of nothern Thailand, and processing equipment in order to meet these standards. Today, over 400 coffee farms in northern Thailand are 100% farmer owned. ITDF purchases single-source, pesticide-free coffee beans directly from these farmers and markets them as Lanna Coffee. The main market is in the US.
To bring the story full circle, the manager of Lanna Coffee’s warehouse and coffee processing operation (and our guide on this excursion) is Mike Mann’s son, Richard, named after his grandfather who first introduced coffee seedlings into the highlands of northern Thailand over 60 years ago