Coffee from the hills above Chiang Mai
If you have ever wondered why Chiang Mai feels so quietly serious about coffee, the answer lives in the hills — usually a short drive out of town, sometimes a longer one. Northern Thailand has spent the last forty years becoming an unlikely specialty-coffee region, and most of the beans you taste in cafés around the Old Town began their lives somewhere up there.
This is a short, calm primer. Nothing technical. Just a few names worth knowing the next time a barista mentions them.
Doi Chang
An hour and a half north of Chiang Rai, Doi Chang is probably the name you have heard most often. The village sits high enough that mornings are cool and mists do most of the cup-quality work. The story most often told is the slow transition from opium cultivation to coffee in the late 1980s — a real change, but one that took a generation to round out. Today the village is dotted with washing stations and small co-ops. Cups from Doi Chang tend to taste round and nutty, sometimes with a quiet stone-fruit edge.
Doi Tung
Closer to the Burmese border, Doi Tung was developed by the Mae Fah Luang Foundation as part of the same broader effort to replace poppies with sustainable crops. The slopes are steep and the cool air long. Coffees from this area can be brighter — a little more floral, a little more tea-like — and the visual identity around them is some of the most thoughtful in Southeast Asia.
Doi Pa Mee, Doi Inthanon, and the smaller villages
Outside the two famous names, dozens of smaller producers work hills like Doi Pa Mee and the high slopes around Doi Inthanon. The cups vary widely, sometimes village to village. This is where Thai specialty coffee feels least branded and most personal — single farms, single lots, often single people pouring their year into a kilogram of beans.
What to listen for at a counter
If a café tells you where their beans came from, take a moment with the answer. Most northern Thai coffees in 2026 are washed Arabicas, but more and more honey-process and natural-process lots are surfacing. The flavour notes you'll hear most often: muscovado, almond, cocoa, jasmine, sometimes a soft red fruit. None of them try to overpower you.
We choose beans with this kind of quiet character in mind — coffee that tastes like the place it came from, not coffee that performs.
If you'd like to taste some of this, we're around most days from nine. The bean rotation changes a few times a year; ask whoever's behind the bar what's on at the moment.