The first sip

My wife is from Kunming, the capital city of Yunnan, China. The first time I drank coffee from her part of the world, I remember thinking: man, that's really good.

Over the next couple of years I started seeing Yunnan beans turn up on shelves at the best speciality cafes around Australia. Still rare, but more often. Enough to make me curious.

So on a recent trip back to Kunming, I asked my wife to introduce me to her friend Fiona, who spends her time travelling to the small farms around Yunnan, cupping greens and picking the best micro-lots she can find.

She showed us what most people don't realise. The really good coffee comes from a handful of places, mostly in the southern region of Yunnan. The best lots are tiny — sometimes a few hundred kilos, sometimes less. Only a sliver of that ever makes its way out of China.

Then there's what the local roasters do with it. Some are infusing rose petal and lemon tea into the beans as they roast, creating floral single-origin roasts that taste extraordinary on filter. Unlike anything I'd had before.

I came back home thinking Australians need to try this.

— Lachlan Nicolson, founder of South Cloud

A long quiet century

In 1892 a French missionary named Alfred Liétard carried a coffee plant into a remote Yunnan village called Zhukula. He grew it for his own cup. But coffee never really caught on. Yunnan stayed famous for tea. For the next ninety years that was the story — a few hundred hectares tucked into the mountains, mostly going nowhere.

Then in 1988, Nestlé arrived. By 2013 there were over 100,000 acres of coffee growing in the province. Catimor mostly. Volume, not flavour. A commodity story.

Around 2018 is where things take a turn. A new generation of Yunnan farmers, many of them the children and grandchildren of the Nestlé-era growers, stopped chasing yield. They started reading about processing, travelling to Panama and Ethiopia, and trying washed, natural, honey and anaerobic methods on their own beans. The results surprised everyone. Including them.

Yunnan sits at the same latitude as Yemen. The altitudes match the best of Colombia. The microclimates rival anywhere on the coffee belt. What was missing wasn't terroir, it was care. And care has arrived.

Why South Cloud?

Right now, only a handful of roasters are quietly buying Yunnan lots. Most of them are in Melbourne. But for most Aussie roasters and most drinkers, coffee from China is still an untapped experience. We exist to change that.

Our mission is to become a bridge between Yunnan growers and Australian roasters. We source from people we know, starting with LEE, a speciality roaster in Kunming. We also keep a small allocation of roasted beans for ourselves, released once a year as a consumer drop. Limited, traceable, and good enough to convert even the sceptics.

130 years after Alfred Liétard planted those first 24 trees in Zhukula, Yunnan is finally on the map as a serious speciality origin.

Coffee from south of the clouds.
About time.