Cambodia: the next coffee frontier?
Boston university Professor
KCJS Professor
On Sunday, June 1, 2003, a most extraordinary kaffeeklatsch took place in my dining room in the KCJS professor's house in Kyoto. Japanese gentlemen, jackets off and sleeves rolled up, were sipping and spitting with furrowed brows and high concentration. Not since last year's Boston Wine Expo had I seen such a display of studied connoisseurship. What we were sipping, however, were not Barolos or Burgundies but Southeast Asian coffees, comparing Cambodian robusta ( a hybrid originally from Africa called Catimor) to its Vietnamese and Indonesian counterparts, to see if the Cambodian could make it in the large and discerning Japanese coffee market. And in doing so, fund schools and hospitals in that still devastated country which some call "pre-Third-World."
Robusta is not a high-end stand-alone coffee bean. It is a bean that has been used primarily in instant coffees, a low-end use in the connoisseur's view, but it is crucial in fine blends, such as most Japanese coffeehouses serve, and in the rich and strong coffees making excellent iced coffee. It balances the acid of Colombian and other arabica beans, and provides the base. Imagining Cambodian coffee in Japanese coffeehouses, I see this brew enlivening conversation, stimulating creative thought and making alert the drowsy businessman. As an iced coffee, Cambodian beans are perfect for what I call the summer coffee ceremony: you pour the sugar syrup from a tiny pitcher, along with the heavy cream from another tiny pitcher and watch the swirl of color trickle down through the ice. Lovely. Cambodian coffee has a higher level of caffeine when I brewed myself some of our Cambodian coffee dark, strong and straight, it gave me a jolt, and I am the kind of person who drinks coffee to calm down.
I have been studying the advent of coffee and the public spaces in which it is sipped in Japan, from the late nineteenth century to the present and in doing so have met some very serious coffee mavens. Green tea is not the beverage most consumed: Japan is the third largest coffee importing country in the world. There are at least three cafes or coffeeshops (kissaten) on every urban block and the discernment of the Japanese coffee drinker, nose to her cup of mandelhing made in a glass siphon system, transcends that of most American barristas. Most of the kissaten I frequent make their own blends, or buy carefully chosen blends from the larger importers. The two leading "straight" coffees in Japan are still Kona from Hawai'i and "buru man" or Jamaican Blue Mountain, though recent scandals over mislabelled beans have lowered sales of these two expensive and rare types. For many reasons, including a heightened awareness of the vast world of coffee, visits to kissaten these days are lessons in a more global geography. I have seen the world from the seats of over fifty kissaten/cafes in Kyoto this year and believe me, it's a terrific place to do fieldwork!
My friends in the coffee industry in Japan, people of the industry at all levels, gathered at the introductory tasting of Cambodian coffee and helped turn my academic research project into aid for the growers themselves. Coffee may not turn around Cambodia on its own, but it might be one source of benefit. The real movers and shakers for village Cambodia are Richard Dyck and Bernard Krisher, who have been in the business of building schools and hospitals in Cambodia for some time. Krisher, who established organizations such as the American Assistance for Cambodia, and Japan Relief for Cambodia, counts 250 village schools built to date, some of them models of advanced technology in villages
only barely electrified. He has also established a telemedicine project for Cambodia, connecting clinics with Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Dyck, a businessman in Japan and China, has enthusiastically supported Krisher's efforts and himself built several schools - as well as providing a large network of "friends" of the Cambodian projects.
So a lot was at stake as the tasters gathered at my Kyoto table. Watching the serious faces of the professional tasters, we held our breath and only afterward, in a quietly stated email message, did the verdict come: "We can go with your coffee. We want to help."
Since then, our team went to Cambodia and returned. We spent time with development experts, Japanese and American, in Phnom Penh, and visited the province of Ratanakiri in the north, not far from the strongholds of the Khmer Rouge and not far from areas still riven with land mines. We visited the elementary schools and the clinics funded by Japanese and American donors and we brought medical machines and supplies as well as equipment for schools. We saw what selling our coffee will be able to produce. And we met the farmers whose work we will subsidize until the coffee is of good enough quality to sell in Japan, a discerning market.
And we swam under waterfalls, ate durian, mangosteen and other delicious fruits and climbed temples at Angkor Wat.
This trip to the source of a fine and scarcely known coffee was thrilling for me, an academic anthropologist and food scholar, but the idea that something I am studying can actually bring education and health to that still war-ravaged country is even more stunning. In my ivory tower, I can already smell the coffee.
