K'Ho Coffee

K'Ho Coffee's heirloom Arabica trees trace back to the 1940s, when Rolan Co Lieng's grandfather — working on French colonial road-building crews — came into possession of coffee seeds and planted them in the jungle around Langbiang Mountain; the K'Ho Cil community had been growing arabica in the area since French traders introduced it around 1900. Production stopped for roughly two decades during wartime and only resumed in the 1980s and 90s, when families including the Liengs replanted the original trees on their Bonneur'C village farms. In 2011, Rolan — a fourth-generation coffee farmer — and her husband Joshua Guikema organized those individual family plots into a formal cooperative, cutting out the middlemen who had been buying cherries at low, undifferentiated prices and returning a fairer share directly to the roughly 50 K'Ho families who grow the coffee. The cooperative still follows traditional agroforestry methods rather than converting to monoculture, processing typica, bourbon, yellow bourbon and caturra lots as washed, natural and honey coffee by hand. Beyond selling roasted beans, K'Ho Coffee runs farm visits on Langbiang Mountain itself, letting buyers see the same heirloom trees that have supplied four generations of one family before the coffee ever reaches a bag.