02·1 The origin
Sơn La, briefly: how coffee got up the mountain.
French planters carried arabica into northern Vietnam in the late 1800s, and it settled where the climate agreed with it — the cool, high valleys of the northwest. While the rest of the country became the world's robusta powerhouse, the mountains around Sơn La stayed stubbornly arabica country.
Today the province is Vietnam's arabica heartland: tens of thousands of smallholder family farms working slopes between 600 and 1,200 metres, where cold nights slow the cherry and concentrate the cup. Most of it never leaves Asia as single-origin — it disappears into blends.
That's the gap Noirda works in: direct grower relationships in Sơn La, one named origin on the bag, imported and roasted for Europe under our own label.
~1888Arabica reaches Tonkin with French missions — a century later, Sơn La grows more of it than anywhere else in Vietnam.