Cliff Natural Coffee

Everything here was planted by hand.

Kavre, Nepal

Cliff Natural Coffee works with family-led farms in Kavre, where cool mountain air, clean water and a lot of patience shape every harvest. Nothing here is farmed at scale, because nothing here could be.

See what we grow

Four years until these are coffee.

A grower in a dhaka topi planting a coffee seedling in Kavre, with a row of drawn saplings continuing across the soil beside it

1,000–1,600m

Altitude grown

Washed

Clean cup profile

Family farmed

Community supported

It starts on one hillside

Kavre is the largest coffee-growing district in Nepal, which in Nepali terms still means a few hundred hectares stitched together out of smallholdings. Ours sits on a south-facing mid-hill slope between 1,000 and 1,600 metres.

Every lot is processed by the washed method, which is the fussier option and the reason the cup comes out clean and bright rather than muddy.

Growers in dhaka topi hand-sorting parchment coffee across a raised drying bed

How a cherry becomes a bean

Coffee is a fruit. Everything between picking it and roasting it is an argument about how to get the seed out without ruining it.

  1. 1

    Picked by hand

    Only the ripe cherries, and only the ones that are ready that week. The same tree gets walked several times across a harvest, because a machine cannot tell red from nearly-red and cannot climb that slope anyway.

  2. 2

    Pulped the same day

    The outer fruit is stripped off within hours of picking. Leave it longer and the cherry starts fermenting on its own terms rather than ours.

  3. 3

    Fermented, then washed

    The seeds sit in tanks for between twelve and thirty-six hours until the sticky mucilage breaks down, then get rinsed clean in channels. This is the step that gives washed coffee its clarity — and the reason it takes so much more water and work than drying the fruit on.

  4. 4

    Dried slowly on raised beds

    Ten to fourteen days on mesh beds off the ground, turned by hand so they dry evenly and never sit damp. Too fast and the seed cracks; too slow and it moulds.

  5. 5

    Rested, hulled, sorted

    The parchment layer comes off, and defects are picked out by hand on the tables. It is slow, unglamorous work and it is most of what separates good coffee from ordinary coffee.

A grower in a dhaka topi planting a young coffee seedling

The nursery, and why it exists

The farm team built a managed nursery to keep the coffee healthy for the long run. It also supports nearby households with technical guidance and free arabica seedlings.

Giving away plants sounds like a strange business decision. It is how a growing region ends up with coffee worth buying in ten years, which is roughly the horizon we are working to.

A household with its own healthy trees has something to sell to whoever pays best. We would rather compete for that than rely on anyone having no alternative.

One coffee, and why

We could list five regions and sell eight coffees. We would rather buy one properly, from the same families, every season — so the growers can plan, and so we can tell you exactly what is in the bag.

Altitude
1,000–1,600m
High enough that the cherries ripen slowly, which is where the sweetness and the acidity both come from.
Aspect
South-facing
The mid-hill slopes that catch the morning sun and drain well after the monsoon.
Variety
Arabica
Effectively the only thing grown for coffee in Nepal, and the reason the cup is sweet rather than rubbery.
Process
Washed
The fussier option, and the reason the cup comes out clean and bright rather than muddy.
Roast
Medium
Far enough to bring out the chocolate, not so far that the orange peel is burnt off it.
Taste the difference