Indonesia Coffee Beans

Brothers Kevin & Kenny Soewondo started their coffee careers by opening a café in Surubaya, the largest city in East Java. As they grew they started a roastery. This piqued their interest in coffee processing and it wasn’t long before they were renting old rice processing and drying stations and using them to process their own green coffee. Buying cherry from farmers living and working around Mt Ijen. The majority of the farmers here are Madurese, their grandparents having come from the Madura island. The cherry once sorted via an optical sorter goes through a 2 day Anaerobic Fermentation. Cherries are dried, hulled then another round of sorting.

An anoxic honey processed Indonesian filter roast with cola sweetness, wine gum fruit, and soft spice.

REGION : Bebesen, Sumatra ALTITUDE : 1,300 - 1,600 MASL VARIETAL : Abyssinia PROCESS : Anaerobic Natural FLAVOUR NOTES : Cola, Blackberry jam, Iced Tea Aulia Kahfi inherited Rakyat Farm from his family and has been involved in coffee production since his early teens. His interest, however, has always leaned towards speciality coffee. At a time when there was little local demand for it, he took an unusual detour, spending several years mining and selling vesuvianite, a mineral found around volcanic regions, before returning to coffee. Now in his early thirties, Aulia has steadily expanded his operation beyond the family farm. Travelling in an old van or borrowing a friend’s car, he buys ripe cherry in small quantities from neighbouring producers in Lukup Sabun, Pantan Sile and Ratawali, more recently extending his network to Gegarang in Jagong Jeget. His commitment to quality has gained wider recognition. In 2019, Aulia placed ninth in the Sumatra Prestige Cup with an exceptional wet-hulled lot. He calls his experimental and specially processed coffees ‘Sesongot’, after a distinctive caterpillar native to Gayo that can often be found among the coffee trees. Its unusual appearance felt like a fitting namesake for these equally distinctive lots. Like most coffee farms in Sumatra, farms here are small, typically between 0.5 and 2.5 hectares. Coffee is the principal cash crop, but it grows alongside vegetables, maize and fruit, much of which becomes an important part of farming families’ diets throughout the year. For this lot, Aulia selectively hand-picks ripe red cherries and supplements his own harvest with carefully selected cherry from neighbouring farmers. The cherries are fermented for 24 hours, with the water changed every 12 hours, before being laid out on patios to dry. Throughout drying, they are raked regularly to encourage an even and consistent process.