The Woman Who Bought the Lychee Coffee
I bought the lychee coffee. Yes, me. The person who bangs on about sensory honesty, agricultural truth, and the dignity of coffee as a crop… bought the lychee coffee.
Not ironically. Not as a joke. Not as a “look what the kids are doing these days.” I bought it, roasted it, brewed it, put it on batch - and then I watched what happened.
The roasters raised an eyebrow - the “Hazel… really?” one. The baristas tasted it and went quiet in that “I don’t know what to do with this information” way. And the batch‑brew crowd - the sensible, steady, filter‑first people - lit up. Gotten bit in the mouth, they fanged out. Fully. A fan base was born in 48 hours.
And there I was, the accidental promulgator of the very sensory spectacle I’ve been side‑eyeing for years. Welcome to the paradox.
There’s something both delightful and unsettling about watching a room react to a coffee that tastes like lychee‑on‑lychee.
It’s fun.
It’s surprising.
It’s dopamine in a cup.
But it’s also a sign of where the palate is drifting. People didn’t respond to it as coffee. They responded to it as a flavour event they stumbled into at their local.
And I get it - the world has trained us to crave the hyperreal:
- cooking shows where chefs artifice dishes into fruit, veg, rocks, even the plate
- wagyu that’s basically edible lotion
- melons engineered to taste more melon than melon
- natural wines that drink like fermented fruit salad
- Instagram’s endless “is this real or is this cake”
- and now, coffees that taste like the Platonic ideal of lychee
We’re living in a sensory economy where “more‑than‑real” is the new baseline. And I just poured fuel on that fire.
I remember what coffee used to do without any of this.
I remember:
- the orangey Kenya that tasted like someone squeezed a Valencia over the cup
- the blueberry Harrar that felt like a magic trick
- the Gethumbwini with its proud blackcurrant backbone
No inoculation.
No microbial theatre.
No “innovation.”
Just altitude, cultivar, soil, and disciplined processing.
Those coffees were miracles of agriculture - not miracles of fermentation. And climate change is eroding that natural magic faster than we can preserve it. As intrinsic flavours fade, the industry fills the gap with engineered ones. And the palate adapts. Too quickly.
What happens when the next generation has never tasted a Kenya that tastes like Kenya?
When “blueberry” means “blueberry concentrate”?
When “floral” means “floral perfume”?
When “lychee” means “lychee squared”?
What happens when agricultural truth becomes the quietest voice in the room?
Yet I bought the lychee coffee. Because I’m not a monk guarding the last scroll of True Coffee. I run a business. I have staff, rent, customers, and a brand that lives in the real world.
I bought it because I’m curious. Because I want to understand the trend from the inside. Because my customers deserve the full spectrum. Because I can contextualise it. Because I can hold paradox.
If we’re going to play in the world of hyperferments and sensory spectacle, then let’s do it consciously. Let’s not forget:
- what coffee is
- where flavour comes from
- what climate change is taking
- what processing can add - and what it can erase
- what we owe to farms and land
- and what we’re teaching the palate to crave
There is deep joy when a washed coffee presents tangerine and brown sugar with clarity - not drowning out the coffee, not masquerading as juice, but offering real agricultural magic that rewards attention.
My concern is simple: we’ve become so hyperstimulated, so spoilt by hypersimulation, that we’ve deputised our enjoyment to maximal offerings. Quiet no longer reads as subtle; it reads as empty.
I bought the lychee coffee. I sold it. I watched the room fall in love with it. And I’m concerned - not because the coffee was bad, but because I can feel the ground shifting under our feet. I don’t want us to lose the memory of what coffee can be when the world allows it to be itself.