Myanmar Greenland

Green Land Coffee Plantation was founded by U Sai Wan Maing in 1999 afterselling his rubber plantation. It is located in Pyin Oo Lwin, formerly Maymyo, a scenic hill town known for its botanical gardens and examples of colonial architecture. Rising from the central basin, it is contained within the Shan plateau at 1150 metres above sea level in the east of Myanmar and forms part of the Indo-Malayan mountain system.

Green Land is one of Myanmar’s largest coffee plantations, starting out as 30 acres with a rapid expansion in the first three years to becoming over 580,000 coffee trees grown on 450 acres. The main variety grown is known locally as Costa Rica, though in reality is a Catimor from Costa Rica. Sl34 forms around 10% of the farm but U Sai Wan is also conducting experiments with Yellow Bourbon, Caturra and Catuai too. Shade is too heavy to produce great quality in some areas of the farm, and Rust has already started in the older trees, so these areas are forming the focus for the immediate future.

Once picked, the beans are immediately separated from the cherries and naturally sun-dried, then sorted in size and hand-graded to remove the impurities. Although Green Land have both a wet and dry mill on the farm, this is still early days and a lot of the dry milling is done with MCG (Mandalay Coffee Group), the exporter.