Vietnam. K’ho Coffee Cooperative
Text & Photos: Agnese Soko
It’s 5 am and a huge rooster has screamed and pooped in my room once again. I nearly tangle up in drying pig intestines in the kitchen, where I brush my teeth. It’s nearly time to start sorting coffee cherries. How the hell did I get here?
After driving for an hour on a very bumpy road, nearly run over by aggressive bus drivers and seeing a couple of road incidents, I arrive at my destination. It’s a little mountainous village called Lang Biang, located north of Da Lat, Vietnam. This area is known for its coffee and apparently is a place where the specialty coffee crowd goes during the harvest season. That’s what I’ve been told in Saigon by my friends who work in the coffee industry. Luckily the harvest still hasn’t ended and the coffee trees are leaning down to the ground with the weight of ripe, beautiful cherries.
I am circling around a little street in search of any sign of a big coffee cooperative. Every single house has a little patch of coffee beans laid out in the backyard, drying. And every single house looks the same. Finally I spot a sign saying K’ho and that’s the name, which I am looking for.
I go down a narrow path that’s leading to a tiny coffee shop where I meet Rolan. After she makes me a cup of coffee with one hand, while receiving 10 phone calls with the other hand and trying to converse with six other tourists, I am shocked in the best possible way. A delicious, sweet cup of coffee in Vietnam? And my eye is not twitching from the high caffeine content? Honestly, that’s not what I expected. And little did I know that I’ll be making, picking, sorting and roasting it a week later.
Rolan Cohein is the owner of the cooperative and the fifth generation coffee farmer. Her great-grandfather was the first person in Vietnam to receive a red bourbon bean from the French missionaries. So he planted it and it still grows as heirloom varietal. Her grandfather and father inspired her and gave her the passion and love for coffee farming so she was doing it as well as she could. Later in life people told her that she was growing specialty coffee but she hadn’t even heard the term. Rolan and her husband Josh, who is American, decided to expand and dedicate their lives to growing coffee.
They established a cooperative named K’ho and currently are buying coffee at a premium price from 70 different farmers around the area. The altitude varies from 1500-1800 masl. The temperature fluctuates drastically. From 7 degrees at night, to 25 during the day. This is what really impacts the flavor of their coffee and increases the sweetness and complexity in the cup profile. They are trying to use only sustainable farming practices. From growing shade trees to planting peanut grass, which provides additional nitrogen for the coffee trees as well as using coffee cherry skin as a natural fertilizer.
The crazy thing is that I didn’t know any of this before going to K’ho. It was by chance that I found the only and the most respectable coffee cooperative in Vietnam and became a part of the community.
On the day I arrived Rolan asked me if I wanted to work on the farm. There was a lot of work to be done and they were short of hands. ‘Do I want to? I’ll do anything, just put me to work!’ – was the first thought on my mind.
That’s how I ended up sorting green and red coffee cherries in the greenhouse. No one told me how long I should stay or came to check on me so I just stayed working till the sun set and came back every day for a week to lean over the raised drying beds and sort the cherries. Farmers dropped off a few hundreds of kilograms of fresh cherries every day. Sometimes the local pickers would come to help, some days Rolans’ husband Josh came and sorted them with me but some days I was just on my own.
It’s a tough job but the excitement of being at a coffee farm and touching real coffee cherries every single day kept me going and I was not thinking of leaving till there were no more cherries to sort.
After a week Rolan and Josh started to find time for me. I guess they started to like me and opened up to me. It wasn’t long till they asked me to move to the farm and from a sorter I became almost a family member in a matter of weeks. My jobs differed from sorting cherries, baby sitting, driving, being a barista in the local café to roasting coffee, sorting defected green beans, preparing samples for buyers, tagging along on SCA regional cuppings and leading farm tours for tourists.
It didn’t come easy though. Some challenges included having chickens poop in my room every morning, village kids sleeping in my bed, catching a tropical fever, overcoming my insecurities and leading tours of the farm for tourists, eating chicken nails, bugs and frogs.. I could go on but I did not think it was even a little crazy at the time. It was my life for all of the six weeks I spent there and it was so busy that there was no time to stop and realize.
Everything comes to an end and so did my time at K’ho. My visa was about to expire and it was time for me to move on. It didn’t happen without a few kilograms of coffee in my backpack, a few tears and promises to come back soon again. Conclusion? Life is like a bag of a coffee blend – you never know what you’re going to get.