Highland Harvest · Plateau-Grown Coffee
Bolaven Plateau Coffee (Pakxong Coffee)
Photo: Krismartyn / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0
French planters seeded the plateau's first coffee trees in the early 20th century, and today robusta makes up roughly three-quarters of Laos's coffee harvest, even though it's the plateau's arabica that's prized for notes of dark chocolate and red fruit.
Coffee cherries grow on volcanic soil at elevations of 1,000 to 1,350 meters around Pakxong, hand-picked by small farming families before being processed, roasted, and brewed strong in the cafes and roadside stalls of nearby Pakse.
Why it's made this way: French colonists planted the first arabica and robusta stock here in the early 1900s, and the plateau's cool, rain-heavy climate has made it the source of nearly all of Laos's coffee ever since, sustaining many local farming families today.
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