China is a growing giant in the coffee industry. Long associated with tea, coffee is a (relatively) new crop in China, but each year we are impressed with the excellent coffees we get to taste. This coffee from Xingang in Yunnan deftly combines nutty and fruity flavours, bringing together notes of hazelnut and rich blackberry acidity. It has a delicate, floral sweetness, with an intense mouthfeel and a floral finish that lingers for what feels like hours. The Xingang farm is run by Yenai and her eldest daughter Zhaomei. They process their coffees with a natural double fermentation. Here, the ripe cherries are fermented in sacks for three days before being laid out on beds to be dried in the sun for two days, followed by a much slower second fermentation, where the coffees spend as long in the sacks as they need to fully develop their flavours, before their final, month-long drying phase. The team at Xingang Farm emphasise sustainability and quality in their coffees, following ecological farming practices and harvesting their coffee cherries at their ripest point. As China's coffee industry is relatively young, they're also very open to experimental processing methods, producing some of the most innovative and unique coffees we've ever tasted. Their successes have been recognised with Xingang achieving 2nd place at the the 2020 Yunnan Green Coffee Competition. Yunnan is China's most biologically diverse region, and is historically known for being the first place humans ever brewed tea. But coffee is slowly catching up with its rival in Yunnan, which offers excellent growing conditions for coffee too. Located between the tropical and subtropical regions, Yunnan has a unique microclimate influenced by both the Indian Ocean's warm currents and the altitude of 1400-1700 metres above sea level. This creates the large contrast between daytime and nighttime temperatures so prized in coffee cultivation.