The Humble Roots of Cambodian Coffee

Khmer Times/Michael Light

Thursday, 10 March 2016

Sophorn Phan mixes coffee beans at Feel Good Coffee. Fabien Mouret

Sophorn Phan was born poor in 1988 in a small house in Takeo province. He described his father—drafted into the Cambodian military at 18 during the Khmer Rouge times—as “lost” by the time he was old enough to start remembering him. Sophorn’s mother raised him and his seven siblings on her own. By the time he was 14, Sophorn was working. His first job was picking the young leaves off tamarind trees to bring to a local market for sale. He picked palm fruit for a few months and was excellent at climbing trees.

“Then I was a fisherman,” he says. “In the nighttime, during the right season, sitting by a small river with a net. Cambodia was different then.”  He’d come home early in the morning carrying 10 kilograms of fish. Then, he would get himself ready to go to school. He was discouraged first from attending high school and then college, but did both anyway. With financial help from one of his sisters back home, he’d eventually move to Battambang to study information technology and finance at the university there. Living with an aunt in the city, he never stopped working—when he wasn’t in class he was cleaning her house, or working as an admin at the school, or picking up shifts at a restaurant, which is where Sophorn first made a cup of coffee. 

Now, at 28, as the head roaster at Phnom Penh’s Feel Good Coffee, he is one of the most important figures in Cambodia’s burgeoning industry, a seminal part of the promotion and advancement of the quality of the Kingdom’s coffee. 

Feel Good, a self-described social enterprise, was established in 2013 by industry veterans Marc Adamson and Jose Rivera—who had previously worked in coffee in the US, New Zealand and Australia—in hopes that it would eventually develop into a provider of sustainable employment, education and opportunity for its Cambodian staff. In its two years, the business, which initially consisted of a single cafe employing five young Cambodians, has grown into two cafes with a combined staff of thirteen—and even now those spaces aren’t big enough. 

With clients throughout the country—from small coffee shops to large hotels—the demand for Feel Good’s coffee is only growing; this year they purchased more green coffee beans, the unroasted seeds of coffee cherries that after being cleaned and sorted and roasted and ground become a cappuccino, than ever before. And although Sophorn admits that the Cambodian coffee industry is currently seeing a period of rapid expansion in step with the rest of the growing economy, he and Feel Good are far less concerned about the quantity of clients they deliver beans to or the number of customers that trundle through the doors of their shops. While those things are important, sure, what Sophorn really cares about is quality. 

“When I was 18,” he says, “I could not drink black coffee without sugar. In Cambodia, we drink coffee when we meet with our families, when we celebrate, in the morning, at nighttime, in our offices and at funerals. The most popular preparation is coffee with sweet milk and ice.”

Most of that imported coffee from Vietnam, he explained, “tastes terrible.” Coffee can pretty simply be split into two literal family trees—the Arabica family, which is known for its quality, and the Robusta family, whose beans comes from easily-cared-for trees that generally end up being freeze dried and packed into containers of Nescafe. A lot of the coffee being bought and consumed by Cambodians is Vietnamese Robusta, which is easily imported and costs nearly nothing per kilogram—$6 at the lowest. For reference, the world’s most expensive green coffees, generally belonging to the Arabica family’s Gesha variety grown in Panama, can cost upwards of 36 times that. Part of Feel Good’s mission is to source all its green beans from Southeast Asia. They import high quality coffees from places in Thailand, Laos and Vietnam. But, as Sophorn explains, Feel Good is also committed to promoting Cambodian-grown coffee. 

To learn that a coffee crop even exists in the country is surprising to some, but as it turns out there are quite a few farmers in Mondulkiri growing a hybrid Catimor (Arabica) variety. The majority is bought up by large-scale distributors in Phnom Penh, but the coffee also shows up as 10 percent of Feel Good’s signature blend, which is otherwise made up of Lao and Thai coffees. 

“The main thing is that in Cambodia, there is an environment conducive to growing coffee—there are waterfalls and high elevation and lots of shade for the trees to grow in. We hope that buying and using coffee from Mondulkiri will promote Cambodian coffee as a whole, and encourage farmers to pay attention to the quality of the coffee they’re growing,” Sophorn says.  

But the representation of Cambodia’s crop doesn’t end within the country’s borders. Last year, Sophorn traveled to Kuala Lumpur to compete in an international barista competition. Stacked against a strong field of competitors, he highlighted the Cambodian notes in his coffee by serving it alongside dark chocolate—which the drink itself carries deep notes of—and tamarind. He was docked few points by judges, and although  he ultimately received second place it was a major victory for Cambodian coffee.

“Since 2008, they’ve opened 700 new restaurants and cafes in Phnom Penh,” Sophorn says. “Coffee around the world is big. In Cambodia it’s getting bigger.”