How Phuket learned to make good coffee — the last seventy years of an island's morning ritual

How Phuket learned to make good coffee — the last seventy years of an island’s morning ritual

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Stand anywhere on Thalang Road in Phuket Old Town and you’re within a hundred metres of three completely different cups of coffee. The first: a small glass of kopi cham — coffee and tea, black, strong, brewed the way it has been in these shophouses for four generations. The second: an oat flat white made on a Slayer machine, using single-origin Ethiopian beans roasted six days ago by a woman who studied hospitality in Sydney. The third: a Nitro cold brew served from a tap, at a cafe designed to be photographed — that one’s for the coffee nerds, not the average flat-white drinker.

Nobody outside the island talks about Phuket’s coffee scene. Bangkok gets the credit for Thai specialty coffee. Chiang Mai gets the credit for the beans. Phuket is the beach island — the assumption is Starbucks, hotel espresso, and the bitter-supersweet roadside iced coffee for thirty baht that hits harder than any Nitro cold brew you’ll ever order.

The assumption is wrong. Phuket has arguably the most interesting coffee ecosystem of any city in Thailand, precisely because it has all four of the country’s coffee eras still functioning at once. The 1950s heritage kopi tiam that served tin miners. The 2000s revival of that same heritage tradition. The 2010s arrival of Australian-style espresso. And the current third-wave scene that would hold up in Melbourne or Seoul.

Four layers, three blocks apart. This is how it happened.

The tin miners — where it likely all started

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The first coffee culture on Phuket did not come from the beach. It came from Kathu, the small inland village built by Chinese immigrant workers who moved to the island in the 1800s to work its tin mines. Coffee arrived with them. So did the shophouse, the temple, and most of the food you now think of as Old Town cuisine.

The kopi tiam — Hokkien for “coffee shop” — was the working infrastructure of the mines. It fed and caffeinated the labourers before their shifts. Marble-topped tables, wooden chairs, black coffee served strong and sweet — pulled through a long cloth sock that acted as the filter, the way the surviving traditional shops still make it today.

The Bumrungwong family ran one of these kopi tiams in Kathu. So did dozens of others. This was the Starbucks of the day, in the words of Wiwan Bumrungwong — Wilai’s daughter, who runs Kopitiam by Wilai on Thalang Road today.

The best-documented survivor of that era is Hock Hoe Lee. In 1958, a Chinese immigrant named Tan Cheng Long set up shop near the Jui Tui shrine in Phuket Town. He had fled the Chinese civil war. He was selling freshly roasted coffee to the tin mining community that had preserved the traditions his own family had brought from the mainland. His coffee was sweet, dark, thick. Word spread.

His late-1960s successor was his oldest son Ko Boon, who had studied in Penang and came back with an understanding of coffee and tea that broadened what the family sold. Boon expanded countrywide. His daughter Ja Ea, US-educated, has run the modern operation since — same recipes, updated infrastructure.

Hock Hoe Lee still operates. The Phuket Town footprint has changed shape over the years, but their Rawai flagship still sells the cold brew that Tan Cheng Long developed. That recipe is now sixty-seven years old and running.

The revival

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By the late twentieth century most of the original kopi tiams had shut. The mining economy was gone. Chinese-Thai families were sending their children to be doctors and teachers and engineers, not coffee shop operators. Wilai Bumrungwong took that path — she became an English teacher and worked for decades in that career, watching the heritage of her family’s coffee shop dissolve around her.

In 2002, on retirement, she opened her own kopi tiam on Thalang Road next door to her brother-in-law’s traditional Chinese pharmacy, Nguan Choon Tong. Not a modern cafe. A conscious revival. Wooden tables. Simple menu. Coffee made the way her parents made it. In 2008 she opened a larger branch two doors down and called it Kopitiam by Wilai, styling it directly after her parents’ original shop in Kathu.

The revival mattered. It positioned the heritage tradition as something worth preserving rather than something to be replaced. When the third-wave specialty scene arrived a few years later, Old Town already had a working narrative about coffee as culture rather than coffee as commodity. Kopitiam by Wilai’s kopi cham — the black-coffee-and-tea blend her family has been serving for close to a century — is still on their menu today. So is a mostly-Peranakan food menu that no beach hotel is going to reproduce.

Wilai’s revival was quiet and the impact was compound. Every Phuket coffee shop that came after her benefited from the frame she rebuilt.

The Australian arrival

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In 2010, an Australian coffee professional called Danny arrived on Phuket. He was not planning to open a business. He was moving here — his wife is Thai, her family is on the island, he was following her home. He’d brought his professional espresso machine and his grinder with him from Melbourne. He wanted his coffee at home.

The problem: he couldn’t buy the beans. Not the beans he needed. He could find plenty of coffee — Starbucks in the airport, roadside stalls in Old Town, Nescafe in the 7-Elevens. What he couldn’t find was freshly roasted specialty-grade coffee. Not once in his first months of searching.

So he started roasting. Then he started selling what he roasted, out of a small operation in Boat Avenue in Cherngtalay. He called it Phuket Coffee Lab. He runs it on a Probat P12 machine now, which is the roaster serious European specialty operations use. He roasts twice a week to hit his own three-week freshness rule.

Phuket Coffee Lab was the first serious specialty operation on the island. It supplied wholesale beans to other cafes years before those cafes could roast their own. Every specialty coffee shop that has opened on Phuket since 2010 owes something to Danny either directly (his beans, his advice, or his willingness to talk to their opening barista) or indirectly (the fact that Phuket residents by 2015 knew what specialty coffee actually was).

Earlier this year, the sign came down. For a fortnight, the resident community assumed the worst — that another decade-old operation had gone the way of the shophouses. It hadn’t. Danny had moved, rebranded, and expanded. What used to be Phuket Coffee Lab is now Melbourne — Cafe, Roastery, Bakery — same operator, same beans, same roasting discipline, plus a full bakery whose sourdough sandwiches deserve their own piece. Bigger and better than the operation was at any point in the last fifteen years.

The Thai wave

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Danny’s arrival mattered because it proved the market. Once fresh specialty coffee existed on Phuket, other people wanted to make it too.

The most consequential of those was Ittipat Klomkliang. Ittipat had got into coffee as a student, teaching himself the craft of roasting through trial and error, over many years, at his own expense. He was Thai. He was from here. He wanted his own shop.

In the early 2010s, he found a small heritage building in Old Town that had previously been a pharmacy — the kind of shophouse the tin mining families had built a hundred years earlier. He converted it into Campus Coffee Roasters. Thai beans. Imported beans. A slow bar. Filter. A pour-over programme that took itself seriously.

Campus is why “specialty coffee” stopped being a phrase applied only to Western-owned shops on Phuket. Ittipat took the tradition his heritage had given him — the Sino-Portuguese shophouse, the practice of coffee as craft — and rebuilt it with modern equipment and specialty-grade beans. He roasts on-site. He supplies to other operators. In 2019 he was fourth runner-up at the Thailand Coffee Roast Master competition. He has since opened a second location in Patong.

Campus’s role in the story is a specific one. It made the Thai-led specialty scene legible to Thai coffee professionals across the island. It gave a whole generation of Thai baristas an aspirational operation to work at or replicate. Every Thai-run specialty shop that has opened on Phuket in the last five years took something from Ittipat’s model.

The wave breaks

By the mid-2010s the pattern was set and the openings accelerated.

Rush Coffee Rommani started roasting in Old Town in 2016. Graph Coffee Co. opened up as the shop of choice for the growing remote-working community — Old Town shophouse, table space, power sockets, single-origin pour-overs, wifi that works. Dou Brew Coffee & Craft leaned harder into design, offering Thai Arabica from Sirinya and Mani Phruek estates alongside a small chocolate operation.

Outside the Old Town core, the scene stretched south. Wilsons opened in Rawai in 2015 and became the morning ritual for a big chunk of the southern expat community — coffee, brunch, breakfast, all of it. BOOST Organic and Ken Ken followed. Osmosis Coffee Roaster started supplying beans across the island. RestDay Coffee Bar & Bake House opened between the airport and Cherngtalay, targeting the drive-past traffic between Boat Avenue and Surin.

When Codi first arrived on the island in 2011, finding a decent cup of coffee took planning. Fifteen years later the problem is different — you’re now deciding between the specialty pour-over, the Melbourne-style flat white, dropping into your local community cafe on the way to the beach, or, if it floats your boat, the kopi tiam heritage shophouse a few sois over. Spoilt for choice, in his words.

Ten years. That’s roughly how long the transformation took.

Where the fourth layer sits

The four layers are: the heritage kopi tiam that survived (Hock Hoe Lee, Kopitiam by Wilai). The Australian and international-founder specialty operations (Melbourne, and its later peers). The Thai-led specialty scene (Campus, Rush, Graph, Dou Brew). And a fourth layer that most coffee coverage misses entirely.

The community cafe.

By community cafe we mean the third-place operations — cafes that function as social infrastructure for their neighbourhood, not as destinations for coffee tourism. They exist across the island. They cluster in Rawai, Chalong, Nai Harn, Boat Avenue, and the residential-adjacent stretches of Old Town. They serve coffee that is good enough — some of them serve coffee that is genuinely excellent — but the coffee is not the point. The point is that this is where you spend three hours on a Tuesday morning when working from home is the plan, or where you take the kids on Saturday, or where you meet the friend who has a life on the island but doesn’t live in your area.

The community cafe layer is what makes the ecosystem sustainable. Specialty coffee alone doesn’t fill a shop on a Wednesday afternoon in low season. Kopi tiam heritage alone doesn’t attract the digital-nomad crowd. Community cafes are what make cafe culture load-bearing for the resident audience. Our friends at Wilsons in Rawai are one of them. So is the growing Drop Espresso group dotted across the centre of the island. So are half a dozen shops in the Cherngtalay-Boat Avenue corridor whose names most first-time visitors don’t know.

We’re not going to hand out a rank of them here. That’s not what this piece is doing. What we are saying is that the fourth layer of the scene is the one you can’t understand from the outside — because it looks like a normal cafe. It just happens to be functioning as social infrastructure.

Present tense

Today, in August 2026, the four layers coexist in ways that make the ecosystem feel much older than it actually is.

Start in Old Town on Thalang Road. Kopitiam by Wilai for a kopi cham the way Wilai’s grandparents made it. A three-minute walk and you’re at Campus, ordering an Ethiopian pour-over from a Thai barista trained on the same technique any specialty shop in Bangkok or Seoul would use. Two more turns and you’re at Graph, or Dou Brew, or Rush. The heritage tradition and the third-wave sit within a hundred metres of each other, and both are working.

Boat Avenue in Cherngtalay does the modern layer. Melbourne — Danny’s rebranded operation — as the anchor. The community cafe on the corner. The remote-working cafe two doors down. And the growing wave of Bartels-style bakery-cafes across the island, offering pretty good coffee and killer sourdough sandwiches — quietly stitching together another layer as they open.

The south does the community scene. Wilsons anchoring Rawai, BOOST and Ken Ken alongside, plus a growing cluster through Rawai, Nai Harn and Chalong that most first-time visitors never see. Hock Hoe Lee’s Rawai flagship still selling the cold brew that Tan Cheng Long developed sixty-seven years ago, a few sois away. Surin has newer operations that have grown up around the space Phuket Coffee Lab used to hold.

Sixty-something-year-old Chinese-Thai families sit next to first-year expat residents sit next to remote workers on laptops sit next to the fighter who trained at 6am and is now finishing a bulletproof coffee before physio. Everyone gets on with it.

Phuket learned to make good coffee across three generations, in four overlapping waves, from tin miners to third-wave. What we have now is what people who never left this culture handed down, plus what people who arrived brought with them, plus what people who came home from Sydney and Melbourne and San Francisco decided to build. The whole scene runs on the same principle it did in 1958. Good coffee, served to the community that’s here today, from people who know what they’re doing.

Sabai sabai — see you at the counter.

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For our 2026 shortlist of cafes worth actually going to, see The best cafes in Phuket — a 2026 resident’s guide.

For the full vetted directory of every cafe and roaster on Phuket: browse the Phuket Community Cafes and Coffee directory.

Editorial note: Wilsons in Rawai is part of the Phuket Community group of businesses. It appears in this piece alongside other Rawai community cafes without special positioning.