Lộc Rừng - Vietnam

We Looked Back.

Vietnam is the second largest coffee producer in the world. You'd never know it from most specialty roaster shelves, because the industry wrote Vietnam off as a commodity origin a long time ago and largely never looked back. We looked back. Lộc Rừng, which translates to "Nature's Gift," is a small processing operation in the highlands of Lam Dong Province, nestled between two primary forests at 1,500 meters. Managed by Kate and Leo, it's a team of four or five people doing work that most operations ten times their size can't touch: ripe-cherry-only standards, relentless fermentation experimentation, and a commitment to sustainability that Kate calls foundational to her entire generation of Vietnamese coffee professionals.

This lot is processed through their in-house Ferveo method, named from the Latin for "to bubble," where cherries ferment in spring water for a full 192 hours before slow drying on raised beds for up to 20 days. The bubbling they watch for during peak fermentation isn't just visual drama, it's a sign that something alive is happening in there, a healthy biological transformation that produces papaya, jackfruit, oolong tea, and a lime brightness that has no business being this elegant.

We paid $6.69/lb FOB, and just over $9/lb landed for this coffee, more than double the commodity price. That's what it takes to actually support the people doing this work, and frankly, it's worth every cent.

This is a limited lot. Get it while it exists.