Origin story
Indonesia
Volcanic islands, a processing method found almost nowhere else, and a cup that divides the room.
Where java became a word
The Dutch planted coffee on Java in the seventeenth century and it became, for a time, the source of most of the coffee Europe drank — which is why an English speaker can still call a cup of coffee a java without thinking about it. Those estates were largely destroyed by leaf rust in the 1880s, and much of Java was replanted with robusta as a result.
Arabica production moved and diversified. Today the specialty weight of the country sits on Sumatra, in Aceh around Lake Tawar and around Lake Toba further south, with smaller and increasingly interesting production on Sulawesi, Flores, Bali and Papua.
Wet hulling, and why
Giling basah is the defining Indonesian process. Cherry is pulped and briefly fermented at the farm, then the parchment is hulled off while the bean is still soft and wet — at a moisture content two or three times higher than anywhere else would risk — and the naked bean finishes drying exposed.
The method exists because of the climate. In a place where it rains most afternoons, a bean dried slowly inside its parchment will mould before it is stable; hulling early gets the drying done in days instead of weeks. It also lets a smallholder sell within about a day of picking rather than waiting on a full dry.
What that does to the coffee
Wet-hulled beans come out a distinctive dark blue-green, and they cup unlike anything else: very low acidity, a heavy syrupy body, and flavours that run to cedar, tobacco, damp earth, dark chocolate and sometimes green herbs. There is nothing subtle about it.
It is also the most polarising coffee in the specialty world. Read charitably it is complexity that no clean process could produce; read uncharitably it is a catalogue of defects that a whole region has agreed to call a house style. Both readings have honest people behind them.
The names on the bag
Mandheling is not a place. It comes from the Mandailing people of North Sumatra and has long since become a trade name for a style of Sumatran coffee, which is worth knowing when a label offers it as though it were an appellation.
Gayo, Lintong, Toraja and Kintamani are real places, and lots named for them are traceable in the ordinary way. A growing number of Indonesian producers are also processing washed and honey lots that taste nothing like the regional stereotype, and they are worth seeking out.
Try it once as a filter to meet it properly, then again in milk, where that body turns into something very hard to argue with.
In the shop
