A conversation with Kawano Yuma of LIGHT UP COFFEE about two drinks — coffee and tea — that share more than they let on. In Part 1, we talked about why LIGHT UP COFFEE chose hand-drip, and the lens through which Kawano-san selects his beans.
In this second half, the conversation moves to roasting philosophy, the rationale behind light roasts, and something I had not expected at all — Kawano-san's direct involvement in coffee cultivation, from building processing stations to forming farmer cooperatives across Southeast Asia.
The LIGHT UP roast. Balance you can drink every day, individuality you can taste.
Q: Listening to everything so far, I keep coming back to one key difference between coffee and tea — roasting. With tea, once the producer finishes processing, there is very little we can do to change the flavor. A handful of tea shops handle their own finishing roast, but that is a tiny minority. Coffee, on the other hand, still has roasting — this entire stage where the shop can shape the taste. Given that you see production as the foundation, what does roasting mean to LIGHT UP once you have received that baton?
There are two criteria for a good roast, and they actually contradict each other. The first is individuality — making the character of the bean stand out.
A bean's character comes from three things: cultivar, processing method, and environment. Take the Kenya we are drinking now. It is fruity, juicy, almost refreshing. If you roast it too dark, let it get muddy or bitter, that character disappears.
The second criterion is balance.
Balance means nothing sticks out too sharply. But individuality, by definition, means something is sticking out. So the two seem to oppose each other — and we are trying to achieve both at the same time.
Our coffee is balanced enough that it stays sweet even as it cools, smooth enough that you want another cup tomorrow. But within that balance, you can still taste the difference between one origin and the next.
The way I see it, for the producers who grow these distinctive coffees to be fairly rewarded — for that kind of production to sustain itself — the coffee needs to reach people in volume. Not as a once-a-month specialty drink, but as something that fits into daily life. Within that everyday balance, you should still be able to feel the individuality. That is what we are aiming for.
Q: I feel the same way about tea. If you ask me what I want to drink every day, I reach for a well-balanced sencha every time. All of LIGHT UP's coffees are light roasts, though. What is behind that choice?
Both dark and light roasts create flavor through the roasting process — no question. But the thing we value most is clarity. Light, clean, easy to drink, and transparent enough that you can perceive the flavors underneath. That transparency is something only light roasting delivers.
Whether what lies beyond that clarity is interesting or not — that depends entirely on the raw material.
— So that is where the quality of the bean itself comes through.
We actually tested this once. We deliberately picked only unripe cherries, processed them, and cupped the result. There was nothing there. No depth, no complexity — just... absence.
That told us something important. If you roast a bean like that light and clear, you get an empty cup. You would be better off roasting it hard, giving the drinker something to grab onto on the first sip. Impact over transparency.
I want to be clear — this does not mean dark-roast roasters are using inferior beans. Not at all. But in our experience, when we roast light and find something compelling on the other side of that clarity, the bean almost always comes from a place where the farming and the processing were done with real care.
Q: So clarity is the goal, and light roasting is simply the approach that gets you there.
Exactly. Light roasting is the method that lets the bean's qualities come through most clearly. That is all it is.
Cultivation, harvest, fermentation. Building coffee from the ground up with local farmers.
Q: I want to circle back to sourcing. You mentioned the criteria for choosing beans earlier — but in practice, how do you actually find them?
Two routes. One is buying through specialized importers, the same way most roasters do. The other is something quite different — we work directly with producers to create the coffee together, from the ground up.
We go to the farms, give feedback on flavor, help design the processing workflow. The coffee that comes out of that collaboration, we buy. We are doing this in Taiwan, Vietnam, Bali, Java, and Sumatra.
— That is a radically different model.
I have never heard of another coffee shop that operates its own processing station, let alone builds one from scratch. I do not think many roasters even know how a processing station works, mechanically speaking.
— Neither have I. Even with single-origin coffee, traceability just means you know where it came from. The shop is still purchasing, not producing.
Plenty of people visit origin. But it is always a tour, a look around. We built a processing station, organized a cooperative of thirty farmers, designed sorting protocols for cherry ripeness, developed fermentation recipes. I have not seen another coffee shop do that.
— So LIGHT UP is involved from the very first stage of production — harvest, fermentation, drying, the whole chain.
We are. Honestly, what is happening in Bali right now feels like a small agricultural revolution.
Last year, a coffee culture magazine called DRIFT ran a cover story titled "It's time for farmers to drink specialty coffee." That line hit me. The idea that the people growing the coffee should finally get to taste what their work becomes — that is exactly the world we are trying to build.
Q: That resonates. There is this well-known problem in coffee and cacao — producers who have never tasted the finished product their raw material turns into. Why Bali, though? What drew you there specifically?
It was the first coffee farm I ever visited. And it was there that I first understood the challenges facing coffee production in Asia.
Bali uses what is called the Sumatra method — and to put it bluntly, it is coffee sold half-dry. Normally you dry coffee beans down to around ten percent moisture. The Sumatra method ships at twenty percent. The farmer gets paid faster, cash turns over sooner. But once that system is in place, there is no incentive to slow down and make better coffee.
When I thought about that clarity I was chasing — the flavor that emerges when you roast light and the transparency reveals what is underneath — the processing I saw in Bali was not designed to produce that kind of complexity. The drying times, the ripeness standards, the fermentation windows — none of it was set up to create a coffee that would reward close attention.
So I told the farmers: let me pay upfront for a few hundred kilos. Use my recipe — just try it once. I genuinely believe this will taste better. They agreed, we made the coffee, and it was good. Really good. That was the moment we understood that Balinese coffee's reputation for being unremarkable had nothing to do with the land or the plants. The problem was processing.
From there, we started sharing what we had learned with more producers. The goal became simple — let us prove that Bali can produce world-class coffee.
Q: When did all of this begin?
My first trip was the year I started working at Recruit, straight out of university. My paid leave kicked in during July. I used every single day of it in August.
— And you have been at it since then? Six years running?
I went in 2015 and came back shaken — convinced this could work. In 2016 we ran the first trial and the results were undeniable. In 2017 we crowdfunded to bring in proper equipment and improve the processing infrastructure. By 2018 we had full production operations on the ground. In 2019 we launched origin tours, and in 2020 we started the coffee farm owner program.
Q: So the past several years of LIGHT UP's work have been building toward this. The production pipeline — from farm to cup — is already in place.
It is. And because I have done it myself — dozens of visits, hands in the soil — I understand which steps in the process have the greatest impact on flavor. When you have worked from the ground up that many times, you learn what matters and what does not.
Q: Picking is visual — you can judge ripeness by color. But fermentation? How did you develop the recipes for that?
Fermentation is basically just letting it sit. But turning that into a repeatable recipe took relentless testing.
When I was in Taiwan, I ran split after split. Pattern A at one temperature, Pattern B cooled down further. I tried every variable I could think of — temperature, duration, ambient conditions — and cupped dozens of results to map how each factor shifted the flavor.
— Trial and error on a serious scale.
Exhaustive trial and error. We ground through the logic until we had a recipe that held up.
— If you can operate from the production stage like that, you end up with something no other coffee shop can offer.
That is exactly it. And that is the story I want to tell — what becomes possible when a roaster is also a producer.
A world where care and quality are rewarded. What producers and shops each owe the chain.
Q: One last question. Tell me about the producer who has left the deepest impression on you — someone whose commitment to the work stayed with you.
That is a funny question.
— Let me go first. We work with a producer in Kagoshima — and this man burns with something. Seventy percent of all green tea grown in Japan comes from a single cultivar called Yabukita. It is reliable, cold-hardy, produces excellent sencha. It spread like wildfire in the 1940s and remains the dominant variety by a wide margin. Nearly every tea producer in the country grows it.
— This producer looked at that and said: if I master the cultivar that everyone grows, I become the best in Japan. So he pours everything into Yabukita. His love for tea-making runs deep, and you can taste it — his Yabukita is not just good, it is honest. The flavor has an integrity to it. He is one of the producers I respect most, both for the tea he makes and the way he approaches the work. I wanted to ask you, Kawano-san, since you are so close to your own producers — is there someone like that on your side?
Well, technically I am a producer too, so the answer would be us.
— Fair point.
But setting that aside — the producer who comes to mind is a woman named Loran, a fourth-generation farmer working at 1,700 meters in the mountains above Dalat, Vietnam.
Her community is an ethnic minority. Until recently, they were known for weaving — textiles, cloth. They insist on natural methods and use almost no machinery. Loran says that as long as you have a tub and water, you can process coffee anywhere. And she means it. The hand-washing she does is staggering — tons of fermented coffee, washed by hand in vats.
In Ethiopia, they run the beans through water channels, stirring with long sticks. In parts of Central and South America, where there is more capital, you see mechanical washers, jet-stream systems that strip the mucilage cleanly. Loran fills an enormous vat with fermented coffee, runs a hose in, and scrubs the beans by hand — like washing rice, except the rice weighs several tons. She changes the water three times, each time scrubbing until it runs clear.
— By hand. All of it.
It is not that her method is better or worse than a machine. It is the intent behind it — the determination to manage every step with her own hands, to make the coffee as good as she possibly can. And the results speak for themselves. Her coffee is genuinely excellent. She pours all of her attention into the question of how to make her community's coffee better.
She loves coffee so much that she has been hospitalized twice for eating too many coffee cherries straight off the tree.
That level of devotion — managing everything by hand, pushing for quality with whatever resources she has — I feel it every time we work together. When she lets me help with the washing and I try to move on to the next batch before the water is perfectly clear, she stops me. No shortcuts.
Q: Tea has a similar history. Hand-picking and hand-rolling were once the standard in Japan, and in a few places they still are. But handwork limits volume — there is no way around it. How does Loran manage the quantity?
Manpower. Everyone pitches in. The whole community works together.
— Without raising prices?
No, they do raise prices — the quality justifies it. And to capture more of that value, Loran has started roasting the coffee herself and selling directly to shops in town. She is finding every possible way to increase what her community's coffee is worth.
— Has the broader coffee industry reached a point where the economics actually flow back to the people growing the beans?
Honestly, I am not sure it has. Coffee is a product that was born in the colonial era. Its value was built in the consuming countries — the developed world — while producing countries have been paid very little for generations. That reality has not fully changed.
The biggest obstacle is distribution. Most producers have never met a buyer or exporter who recognizes the value of what they grow and is willing to pay accordingly. So even if a farmer works harder, even if the coffee gets better — who is buying it? And how would the farmer even know what "better" tastes like? They have never had the feedback loop.
They follow the methods passed down to them because those methods kept the farm alive. That continuity matters. But it also means one bad rainy season, one failed harvest, can break the cash flow and end everything. To prevent that, you need a system — connections, technical knowledge, a path to higher value — that most producers simply do not have access to.
Q: Which is exactly why you got involved at the production level.
Exactly.
Farming, at its core, is a defensive occupation. You are always watching the horizon — will the rain come? Will it come too much? Will the climate shift? You protect what you have. That is the work.
The moment you take a risk, try something new, and it fails — you lose everything. Your livelihood, your family's livelihood. Under those conditions, it is not reasonable to expect producers to be bold. And it is wrong to call them conservative for being cautious.
— I understand that deeply.
That is why we set up the cooperative the way we did. The farmers keep doing what they do — tend the trees, pick ripe cherries, follow the rhythms they know. We take on the risk. The new fermentation methods, the processing experiments, the push toward higher value — that is on us. We absorb the uncertainty so they do not have to.
Someone in the chain has to face outward, toward the market, and accept that risk. We decided that should be us.
Q: Something I think about often is the scale of what producers are up against. They are facing the earth itself — weather, climate, forces no human effort can control. There is a fatalism that comes with that, a sense that some things are simply beyond reach.
A feeling of going with the current because there is no other way.
Q: Which makes them slow to embrace change. Understandably so.
It is hard. You are asking people to let go of the very defenses that have kept them alive.
Q: Their purpose is production — being present with the land, season after season. We understand that. And precisely because that is their role, it falls to us to take the risks they cannot. To protect them by absorbing what they should not have to carry. That is the same whether you are working in tea or coffee, I think.
— From cultivation in the field to extraction in the cup — after today, I feel like I understand what LIGHT UP COFFEE is building. From the farmer to the barista, everyone on the chain is part of the same effort. Thank you for sharing all of this with us, Kawano-san.
What stayed with me, walking out of that conversation, was how much coffee and tea share beneath the surface — not the flavors, but the logic. Someone at the far end of a chain making something as well as they possibly can, hoping the care survives the distance. Kawano-san's answer to that hope is to shorten the chain. We are still finding our own way to answer the same question.
LIGHT UP COFFEE
Kichijoji: 4-13-15 Kichijoji Honcho, Musashino, Tokyo
Shimokitazawa: 2-29-12 Daita, Setagaya, Tokyo
Mitaka (Roastery): 6-36-27 Shinkawa, Mitaka, Tokyo