About the Coffee
The Red Process - Red Wine Process is a fermentation-driven coffee processing method inspired by the principles of red wine production. Despite the name, no wine or alcohol is added to the coffee. Instead, the process creates a controlled fermentation environment designed to encourage the development of ripe fruit, wine-like and complex fermented flavours.
Only fully ripe, high-sugar coffee cherries are selected. The whole cherries are placed into fermentation tanks, where the process may begin with a short aerobic stage before moving into a sealed, low-oxygen environment. Fermentation is carefully controlled at relatively low temperatures, typically around 15–20°C, and may continue for 72 hours or longer.
After fermentation, the cherries remain intact with their skin and fruit flesh and are slowly dried on raised beds or patios. They are turned regularly to ensure even drying until the moisture content reaches approximately 12%. The dried cherries are then rested for at least one month before hulling, allowing moisture and water activity within the green coffee to stabilise.
When well executed, the Red Process can produce a rich and layered cup profile with notes reminiscent of red wine, ripe berries, dark chocolate and tropical fruit, accompanied by a fuller body, rounded acidity and a long, sweet finish. The fermentation character should remain clean and integrated, enhancing the coffee’s fruit sweetness rather than overpowering its underlying character.
As a result, the Red Process can produce a rich and layered cup profile with notes reminiscent of red wine, ripe berries, dark chocolate and tropical fruit, accompanied by a fuller body, rounded acidity and a long, sweet finish.
About
Xingang Estate
Xingang Yanei Estate in Menglian, Yunnan, is best understood through the rhythm of a family working together. Visitors describe it as a place that seems to have grown directly from the soil—vivid, generous and full of southern Yunnan’s light. The estate’s story is not only about coffee trees or processing. It is about the people who return to the drying ground each day and the memory carried in their hands.
The family’s history is visible in the objects that remain. An old tea-drying machine, once used by Yanei’s father, still rests in a corner of the processing site. It is a quiet reminder that rural livelihoods are rarely a straight line: one crop gives way to another, tools remain, and knowledge changes shape without disappearing. The machine belongs to an earlier chapter, but it still watches over the work of the present.
On the drying ground, Yanei’s mother and her sisters continue the daily labour of the estate. They sort, turn, watch and wait, while responsibility passes naturally into the hands of the daughters. Their work is not decoration. It is the structure beneath the coffee—the repeated, physical attention that allows a harvest to become clear and expressive. The estate’s strongest image is also its most ordinary: women bent over coffee in the afternoon light.
At Xingang Yanei, coffee becomes a language shared across generations. The older generation contributes memory and practical knowledge; the younger generation carries the responsibility into a changing market. This continuity gives the estate a particular warmth. Progress does not have to mean leaving earlier lives behind, and a modern coffee can still contain the fingerprints of family history.
Xingang Yanei’s belief is simple and demanding: quality begins with responsibility—to family, to the soil and to the people who make the harvest possible. Its coffees carry the warmth of sunlight and the richness of Menglian, but their deeper character is human. The next ten years can be built from the past, one generation, one drying day and one carefully made coffee at a time.
