The Coffee News

There is a good chance you have already drunk South Sumatra robusta this week without knowing it. This one province grows more coffee than anywhere else in Indonesia, almost all of it robusta, and a lot of it disappears into instant coffee and espresso blends under no name at all.

Ask around Temanggung, and the coffee is rarely the main character. This is Indonesia’s tobacco heartland, and coffee grows in the gaps: on the higher slopes, along the field edges, in the rotation between tobacco seasons. That neighbor is the reason people talk about a “tobacco note” in Temanggung coffee

Hand a roaster a cup of washed Arabica Rinjani without telling them where it came from, and most will not guess Indonesia. They will taste orange, a little strawberry, a clean citrus finish that hangs around, and they will start reaching for East Africa. That reflex is the most interesting

We cup every lot that leaves our warehouse in Medan, which means we also roast every lot first, on a small electric sample roaster, before it is ever shipped. After a few thousand of those roasts, one thing is clear: most beginner roasting problems are not roasting problems at all.

Pull the export records for “Sumatra Mandheling” over the last hundred years, and you are, in part, reading the trade history of a coffee that grew somewhere else. Much of it came from the Angkola and Sipirok highlands, walked north to be aggregated in Mandailing, and left the island under

In April 2016, a coffee from a forest on a West Java mountain walked into a competition in Atlanta and beat the field. Arabica Puntang is arabica grown on the slopes of Gunung Puntang, south of Bandung in West Java, at roughly 1,200 to 1,500 meters, and it is best