Vietnam TN9/10 Champagne Natural - Thy Thy Farm

Tasting Notes

Ginger and lime zest lead the cup, layered over vibrant, juicy acidity, a pleasant nuttiness, and a sugar cane-like sweetness. One of the most aromatic coffees we've tasted yet from Vietnam.

Background

In January 2026, our longtime partners at Karmic Circle Coffee worked with us to run a series of champagne natural process trials on several experimental varieties growing at Thy Thy Farm in Vietnam. Whole ripe cherries were hand-sorted, then fermented for several days with selected wine yeasts before drying slowly in the farm's climate-controlled drying room.

We cupped several varieties from that trial, but the TN9/TN10 blend stood out immediately as the most impressive of the group — aromatic, complex, and unlike anything else we've tasted from the country.

About Thy Thy Farm

Thy Thy Farm is a small, two-hectare specialty coffee farm in the Cầu Đất highlands outside Đà Lạt, in Vietnam's Lâm Đồng province — one of the country's premier Arabica-growing regions, sitting roughly 1,500–1,600 meters above sea level. The farm is run by Lê Ngọc Thy, a second-generation coffee producer continuing and building on the work her father started.

Since 2018, Thy Thy Farm has grown without chemical fertilizers or pesticides, relying instead on organic and microbial soil-building practices, with coffee interplanted alongside persimmon, avocado, and other fruit trees. That attention to soil health and hands-on quality control has earned the farm Coffee Quality Institute (CQI) specialty grade scores and recognition in Southeast Asia's regional green coffee competitions.

While Catimor remains the farm's primary planting, Thy Thy has become one of the more active experimental sites in the region, working with newer research varieties as they move through Vietnam's coffee breeding pipeline — including early WASI selections like THA1, and, through our January 2026 trials with Karmic Circle Coffee, the still-unreleased TN9 and TN10 lines featured in this lot.

About TN9/TN10: The Next Generation of Vietnamese Arabica

TN9 and TN10 are experimental hybrid lines from the same long-running breeding program at Vietnam's Western Highlands Agriculture and Forestry Science Institute (WASI) that also produced THA1, the country's newest officially released arabica variety.

That program began in the early 1990s by crossing Catimor with KH3-1, a coffee-quality-focused material collected from Ethiopia, aiming to combine Catimor's productivity and disease resistance with the aromatic complexity of Ethiopian coffee. The resulting TN1 hybrid was officially recognized as a new Vietnamese coffee variety in 2011, and continued generations of pedigree selection from that same cross eventually produced THA1, approved for trial production in 2016.

TN9 and TN10 are further selections from that lineage, still working their way through field trials on a handful of farms — Thy Thy Farm among them — well before any future commercial release. Tasting this material this early is a rare chance to taste where Vietnamese arabica breeding may be headed next.

Champagne Natural Process

Champagne Natural is a process we pioneered in Hawaiʻi and have since begun teaching to a handful of our producing partners around the world. Whole ripe cherries are hand-sorted, then fermented for several days with selected strains of wine yeast. The yeasts produce fruity esters and help draw out varietal aromatics that might otherwise stay hidden, while the coffee dries slowly and evenly in a climate-controlled environment. The result is a cup with the clarity of a washed coffee, layered with the enhanced aromatics and gently wine-like character the process is known for.

Rare Coffees Tour Feature

This lot was featured to our Rare Coffees Tour subscribers in August 2026 before its general release.

Availability

Extremely limited — only 10lb is left after we shipped orders to our Rare Coffees Tour Subscribers. Thy Thy Farm's TN9/TN10 trial blocks are still experimental in scale, so once this is gone, it's gone.

A Moment of Paradise

Brew as a pour-over to let the ginger and lime zest lead, with the nutty, sugar cane-like sweetness rounding out the back end. A great coffee to slow down with and taste a piece of Vietnamese coffee's future.