Red Cliff Coffee: The Best Brew in Thailand?

When I tell people that I’ve never once tried a cigarette or a hit of weed or any type of drug, I’m often met with disbelief. That’s fine by me, I’m not saying it to impress anyone, it’s just the truth. But there’s one drug that, in my adult life of late nights and early mornings, I simply need to get into my system, and that’s caffeine. I know, I’m a rockstar. Caffeine…hold me back. At any rate, over the past few years I’ve gone from a total coffee n00b to a huge fan, and while I can’t tell you the difference between a cup of Colombian and a cup of Ethiopian, I sure do appreciate a good cup of joe – and what a coincidence! I recently stumbled onto a locally-grown brand that I think is pretty damn good – Red Cliff Coffee.

Unfortunately, I’m still a bit of a goody-two-shoes so I try to limit myself to a single cup per day. Okay, it’s a pretty big cup, but too many daily doses of coffee+milk+sugar sure won’t do my belly any good, so I try to keep it to one. Over the past while I’ve been getting my coffee from Segafredo downstairs from my office, which is good stuff, but at 100 baht per cup, one per day…that’s 24,000 baht per year (USD$780). So, I decided to bite the bullet and make my own. I bought myself a fancy French Press, got a solid scoopin’ spoon and ordered a kilogram of ground beans from my friends in Thailand’s north.

Red Cliff is a small company that grows, roasts and grinds its beans in the Wawi district of Chiang Rai, Thailand. There are actually a lot of plantations up there, from small ones like Red Cliff to giant ones like Thailand’s famous Doi Tung brand, and even a brand that gets its beans from elephant shit (seriously, and it’s $50 per cup). The soil is fertile and the weather is just right, so it’s a perfect place to set up an operation like this. Red Cliff is small – real small – but they know their stuff. To quote the website:

RedCliff Coffee is a two-person operation based in Northern Thailand. After managing a Kona coffee farm in Hawaii and helping Agroforestry Net with a study on the benefits of shade-grown coffee, we moved to Northern Thailand and planted thousands of Arabica trees. Today, we aim to show you that Thai coffee doesn’t have to be over-roasted and bland.

Where Red Cliff Coffee is grown, right next to that patch of trees.

Since I’m not coffee expert, I just ordered medium roast ground beans for my shiny new French Press thingmajig and through trial and error figured out to use it, and it’s working out good so far. At home I use a Moka Pot to make coffee and it tastes awesome in that too. The best thing about Red Cliff – at least for me – is that there’s free shipping within Thailand. I pay via PayPal – 500 baht ($15) for a kilogram – and it’s sitting in my lobby two days later. Not bad.

Before you ask, no, I’m not getting paid with cash or boxes of free coffee to write this. I just happened to get to know the guy who runs the company and really like his stuff. From what I understand, the website is going through a bit of a redesign and doesn’t work like it should, but if you head to the contact page you should be able to send an email and they’ll take it from there. Drop them a line and give it a try.