At the hotel we met with Omar Arango Tinoco and his wife, owners of Finca San Luis, for a quick cupping of 7 of their varieties and fermentation experiments. San Luis has been in Omar’s family for 30 year, and of the 15 years he’s been in charge, 13 have been as an organic farm. Back when Broca hit Colombia a a serious problem, they could not afford to spend more money on pesticides to combat the little beetle and so opted for going organic- savings in chemical fertilizers and pesticides largely weighing out the loss in production. They went from producing 13 cargas (125kg parchment) to 3 cargas per hectare, but now that the market means a lower production is not as financially sustainable, his wish is to get up to 25 cargas with a closer focus on the professional management of the farm. He’s stumping and replanting some areas, experimenting with new varietals such as Castillo but also the old favourites like Bourbon, Caturra and Typica. They’re also planting shade trees that can double as commercial timber to help spread the income from the farm across a larger part of the year.

San Luis is located where a warm and a cold weather system meet, and have a significant impact on how the different lots of the farm perform. The cooler parts tend to cup better and have more acidity and complexity in the cup, while the warmer parts have a higher production. The pickers here are paid a salary per day and not per kg picked. this is an attempt to prevent people from migrating to other peak harvest areas where they get paid per kg for the few weeks that trees are full, and very little when the yields are low. 7 of the 14-16 weekly pickers at San Luis are core staff that have been around for 5-6 years, while the others come and go as needed. Because San Luis is organic and the cherries mature at varying times, they need to pick every week and not in set cycles as in more chemically controlled ripening. Every week the pickers and farm managers select a colour of cherry that they will focus on that week. This selective, continuous picking is of course more expensive but it allows for a better more uniform cherry selection and higher cup quality. Some of the micro lots are picked at night and on weekends for security reasons, theft is a big problem since the farm is located by a public road and it’s hard to control who comes and goes during a busy work week.

In the on site mill you’ll find 2 Jotagallo and 1 Fima pulpers, a demucilager and 5 fermentation tanks, as well as washing channels- something rarely seen in Colombia anymore. Via the washing channels the parchment is sorted into different tanks depending on its quality. When the pickers arrive with the cherries at, say, 4pm, they spend the next hour or two pulping, dry ferment the parchment for 24 hours, washing it through at 5 or 6 pm the following day. Because this is too late in the day to place the parchment onto the drying beds, they soak the coffee in water til the next morning. It’s all very similar to what you see in Kenya. Near the farm houses, secondary quality beans are dried on open beds. The top quality  selections are dried in sheds where triple layered drying beds utilize the natural airflow, staff moving the parchment from the bottom rung and upwards as it dries.

They use the water from the pulping to make fertilizer, but also go though a lot of organic store bought fertilizer. It’s made from chicken, horse and cow manure, coffee parchment, wood chippings, with added nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium. He brought in 1600 bags in October and by March had about 100 left. The recommendation is to use 3kg fertilizer per tree, but Omar started off with 1.5 kg and so far he’s happy with the trees looking healthier, while yield results will become apparent next year. If the progress is good he’ll up the fertilizing schedule, and help supplement the scheme with compost from his own onsite wormery.

At the bottom of a steep hill Omar has a nursery of about 4-5000 Bourbon seedlings that are to be planted on said hill, having cleared off the old Caturra and Colombia trees that were there before. Even if Bourbon is a bit unusual in Colombia, Omar wants to grow it for its cup profile. Back in the 70′s, tests were made of Caturra vs. bourbon that put Caturra at a yield advantage in non shaded areas, whereas Bourbon needed some cover to thrive as well. Since Colombia wanted to push for a more Brazil-style production involving no shade, a lot of what you get out of the country now is Caturra.

A 10 minute drive from the farm house is the 3.5 hectare La Montaña plot, where you’ll find a lot of Caturra as well as Typica. This section goes all the way up to the peak of the mountain, and looking down onto the other side which belongs to a different farm, the difference in tree density and rust damage is noticeable. On the La Montaña side, the ground is spongy and full of flowers. A small part of the plot grows Castillo, or what is said to be Castillo, and we were a bit surprised to find both some fungus and rust on these supposedly rust resistant trees. Another section grows Yellow Tabi, a Caturra and Hibrido de Timor cross, while another 4 hectares are dedicated to yucca. 3 families live on the farm and near one of the homes we find a newly planted plot of Colombia and Caturra where they grow peas in between the rows to help bind the nitrogen in the soil. We walk on to the 3 hectare La Gloria part of San Luis which again grows Caturra and Tipica, closely followed by Chiqui the old farm dog, a real sweetheart and bravely keeping on in spite of looking a bit worse for wear.

Omar feels somewhat at a disadvantage for not farming with chemicals but thinks that in a few years he’ll see the benefits from his work to improve the quality and productivity. The continuing process of investing to improve is never ending, but they feel they are turning a corner for quality, relationships and sustainability. The biggest challenge in going organic is to keep productivity up; besides wanting to be the best organic farm in Colombia for quality and production, they also need to be financially viable. It takes a long term commitment from all parties in the chain to make this happen.

The morning began with more cupping at CKCM, revisiting some old favourites and trying out some unknown factories. Kimathi talked me through the QC process that starts when the bags of parchment arrive at the mill: at least 35% of the arrived bags on a truck get spiked in order to gather a 500g lot sample, 300g of this gets hulled in order to roast a 100g cupping sample and also roast some for the factory rep to take home. The samples are measured for moisture, screen sizes are recorded, and cupping scores noted.

A few of the coffees we cupped performed really well and I was feeling more confident that I’d leave here with some lots confirmed, so grabbed samples of all the ones that interested me so I can roast and cup at home where I’m more in control of the parameters.

We wanted to see more factories today and first up was Kagumoini, headed up by Patrick Kiromo who has been there for 4 years. They receive cherry from 1500 farmers and now near to closing up the final lots for the season have received about 762.000 kg cherry. Some of the final batches of parchment to head to CKCM were being sorted by hand by a crew sat in the comfortable shade at the receiving patio, and I was told it took 3-4 days to sort through a delivery of 300 bags for the mill. They’re currently delivering a truck pr week, but have about 2000 bags in store still to go, another logistical issue that comes with big harvest years. They also still have parchment on the drying beds, being turned by hand and needing another day before it’d reach their target of 9-11%. Isaac, the chairman of the co-op, told us that he was expecting next year’s crop to be as good or even bigger, as when visiting the shambas that deliver to Kagumoini he was seeing a lot of flower spikes on the trees, and the rains had been falling well so far.

Since we had to get back to Nairobi today we only had time for one more stop, the Karatina factory in the middle of Karatina town. Karatina is the oldest factory in Nyeri having been around since 1957, but is a bit less busy today as other factories have sprung up all around. James Githinji met us at the gates and took us on a tour of the facility where 2000 farmers delivered 800.000 kg cherry this year. They have a 3 disc pulper that had just been taken apart for its clan, and a single row of fermentation tanks where in order to do the two stage dry fermentation, they will simply fill the tank with water after the initial overnight fermentation, scrub the parchment by agitating the water with rakes, drain the water out and letting the parchment sit for another few hours. They actually had a bit of parchment just about to be washed off in the channels and pumped through to the drying tables, so I got stuck in to help.

First the concrete channels were washed with clean water, before they started hosing the tank down, flushing all the parchment out through the valve into the gently sloping washing channels. There it gets pushed with rakes against the waterflow to scrub all remains of mucilage off, before it’s collected in a well from which it’s pumped to the drying tables up on the hill. A crew of people had rolled out a sheet of plastic on to the tables and gathered the sides of it up to create a sleeve for the water and coffee to flow through. Moses and Philip had one end attached to the pipe where the parchment would come through, the other at the bottom of the table would be left open to let the water drain. As the parchment started flowing through the sleeve, the ladies would roll up the plastic from the bottom of the hill so the coffee would spread itself evenly on the drying mesh and drain off. Once everything was pumped through, Patrick one of the shamba owners who deliver to Karatina showed me how to flush the system out with water in order to keep everything clean and free from stuck bits of parchment. The whole process seemed to require an enormous amount of water, and while it’s not a natural resource they have limited access to right here, I still wish there was a way of limiting this waste.

We wished we’d had more time to see other factories but as we had to get back to Nyeri before dark, we said our goodbyes and headed back south. Stopping by Bridget’s house before dinner out with her and Kamau I was overjoyed to finally get some fur-time, with her big bouncy guard dogs (not very fierce I have to say!)

FRIDAY

Early Friday morning and I headed to Taylor Winch’s offices to see a friend who recently moved to Nairobi from Kigali, and to cup some coffees of course! I brought some of our Bolivian CSJ for them to try thinking that they probably rarely get to drink anything other than Kenyan coffees, and while first regarded with some suspicion I think Dirk and Matt finally conceded that even if it wasn’t bright and fruity, it was fairly drinkable. Tough audience!

Their lab is beautifully set up and wonderfully spacious feeling in spite of being a hive of roasting and cupping activity. With windows on three walls flooding the space with sunlight and a breeze coming through the open door to the garden, I spared a thought to my crew at home who were probably cupping in close to minus degree conditions in snowy London. Ha ha!

Amos was in full flow running all 5 barrels on their sample roaster, while Dinah and Sam were setting up their second table of the day. They easily cup 4-500 cups here in a day so setting up and evaluating the cups is done with brisk efficiency, and it was great to be able to try everything from grinders to top AA lots on the same table. I was pleased to find Sam, who’s been doing this for 31 years, agreeing with me on most of the thoughts I had on the coffees, whether on the lower or higher end of the quality scale. He was however better able to pick out coffees that perhaps didn’t stand out for me on the first pass, but cooled really well where others fell through. Maybe in another 15 years I’ll get the hang of it… As Sam and Joseph worked their way down the table scoring and taking notes, I picked out some samples to take back home for cupping in my own environment. Again, none of my favourites on the table were AA’s, one of them was in fact a C and one was a bulk AB lot. Funny year for Kenyas this year for sure, I feel like I’ll need to spend a long time cupping and re-cupping to make sure what we bring in this year will be the very best we can find.

Dirk and Matt then took me to their warehouse for a quick tour and an explanation on how they work. As containers were being stuffed in a steady pace, we walked through their spotlessly clean space and beautifully organized receiving, stacking, bulking, sorting, screening, sampling and bagging procedures, discussing the merits of sisal vs jute and the options for grainpro and vac packing.

In the hand sorting room my camera and I turned out to be a big hit with the girls working through the greens, they were quite the lively bunch and noise levels quickly rose to new heights! I’m told they don’t see other women in my role come through there very often, so I was happy that I was a visitor they felt relaxed around, more so than perhaps some severe looking ol’ coffee guy. No offense to all the severe looking ol’ coffee guys out there!

After a lovely lunch at a nearby Nairobi Java House I had to quickly run to catch up with Mie and Ben at the Dorman factory, where they were touring their milling and roasting facilities. As I was admiring (and feeling rather jealous of) their 90kg Probat, I was thrilled to suddenly see John Muli Makau come in, Kenyan barista Champion in 2007, 8 and 9 and one of the nicest most passionate coffee guys I know! He treated us to some cappuccinos off the 3 group La Marzocco set up in the Dormans canteen, the first capp I’d had in a week and just the perfect end to the day.

     
SATURDAY

Last day in Nairobi and instead of relaxing and letting other people relax, we dragged the SMS/Sangana crew from their peaceful Saturday mornings and made them cup with us instead! In their gorgeous cupping lab, Justin and Charli had very kindly put on a full table of some of their offerings both from last crop and the current, and I brought a bag of one of our Kenyas to put on as well. In spite of the differences in our roast styles there was broad agreement on which lots were best on the table, and it was useful for me to cup a table of slightly darker roasts, learning to see through to the coffee in a different way. The way these guys are set up and the developments underway in their link from grower to export are very exciting, and I look forward to following what they do in the near future. It was great to chat to SMS’s TM as well, whose family own an interesting estate in Thika that I hope to be able to visit on my next trip.

Thank you Kenya, I hope to see you again before Christmas!

Today was the first of two days to be spent in Nyeri cupping at CKCM and visiting some of the local factories. At the mill we were greeted by Veronica who showed us to the meeting room and served us some Tegu which was really lovely, turns out she’s from that area, and being one of our favourite coffees it was nice to get a reminder of it. Mid cup, Philip Home came through to show us the workings of the mill, starting with the loading bay where a truck with 200 bags from one of the mills in Embu had just turned up. Right now they’re receiving about 5000 bags per day, and piling them to the rafters to fit it all in the warehouse. Many of the office windows on the 2nd floor that look down onto the warehouse were completely blocked with bags piled way high, and people who’d normally have their desks on the warehouse floor were being moved elsewhere just to make that little bit of room. With such pressure on the system some of the early delivered lots are now at the back walls and at the bottom of these mountains of coffee, meaning that they have to wait to be milled while the crew try to cope just with the new volumes arriving everyday.

Stock rotation looked like a massive headache, and I sincerely worry that this is  adversely affecting some of the lots that are just sat waiting while they keep skimming the surface. They’re processing about 1200 bags of clean green coffee per day, working two shifts just to get through it all, but it’ll still be some weeks till the coffee stops arriving from the factories. Lots of parchment is being held there, ‘conditioning’ or resting. In it self is not a bad thing, it’s just that with the temperatures these days the parchment could really benefit from resting somewhere a bit more temperature controlled. I do hope that if they are really expecting a similar crop next year, that they’ll set up their stock rotation systems a little better. To their credit, the 50 people currently on shifts churning through the coffee were really going at a great speed, efficiently moving through all the stages needed to sort, bag and label the bags. This is also where the samples for the auction room are prepared and sent to Nairobi.

While watching the bags being sewn up I got an explanation of the tag that they stitch in the seam: AA is the screen size and 11/12 the crop year, 13 marks the week the coffee arrived (week one being the first week of October), CK is short for Central Kenya, and 0035 means the 35th truck that week. This outturn number basically tells them where the coffee is from, this being the Kibongoti factory in Kirinyaga. As we walked out towards their demo plot a truck with 250 bags of parchment from Tegu pulled up, and a truck of 700 bags of clean greens left headed to Nairobi to be sold. In spite of the activity levels everything was calm, running efficiently and at a steady pace, a testament to how well organized this place is. I do hope they will be able to perhaps expand their storage capacity in the near future. I’d also love to see the parchment stored in something else than jute and hessian in  these conditions, but the cost of investing in bags is quite prohibitive for now.

We also went for a quick look at the demo plot at CKCM, a lovely set up with everything you need for doing some interesting trials and experiments on growing and processing. Ben and I immediately started thinking about what we could do here if we had a few weeks to spare during harvest season. I might find out what Christmas in Kenya is like this year!

While we’d been getting the grand tour, Ephraim, Sara and Ernest had set up our first cupping in the busy CKCM sample room- a medium sized space that fits in a space for sample storage, screen grading, moisture control, hulling, sample roasting, grinding, cupping, dishes and desks for a couple of people all in one. What their able to do in a limited space and with a huge workload is really impressive, in addition it was Saras first day on the job being trained on roasting and QC, and here we come getting in the way and asking a world of questions. We cupped a selection of coffees we’d requested to see up front as well as a few that Ernest had pulled out for us, mostly arrivals from week 16 and 17 but also some that had come in yesterday and Monday. The samples were not all graded meaning we weren’t cupping fully sorted AA’s or AB’s, but even with that in mind we were finding a lot better aromas up here in Nyeri where the water is softer, compared to Nairobi. The taste was on the overall very good, but still that feeling that the crop this year won’t be showing up those stellar juicy fruit bombs kept creeping in. We’ll see, there’s a lot of cupping still to do and lots are still being processed, so there is still hope. Or, it could just be that Klaus was here last week and swept up all the fruit bombs right from under our noses!

After some deliberation and discussions around roast level and what we wanted to cup next, we headed out to the Ngunguru factory, part of the Tekangu cooperative society (TEgu, KArogoto, NGUnguru) Anthony who is in charge of receiving cherry, and Franklin Wanjau Kario the general manager, gave is the rundown on their stats. This year their 650 member farmers from within an approx. 2km radius delivered 400.000 kg cherry, a big leap from last year when they only delivered 140.000 kg. Last year, with such a small crop and the market so high, they got paid 123 KES pr kg, and this year they told us the farmers were expecting closer to 200 KES/kg. The link between supply and demand obviously means this is not going to happen, and while we try to point this out everywhere we go it seems sometimes to fall on deaf ears. The farmers get a small payment upon delivering the cherry, and the rest of the money only when the lots are sold on to people like us. They’re free to deliver to any factory they want as long as the correct procedures are followed in registering, so can go where they think the price will be highest. Franklin has 1100 trees himself, and he used to manage and deliver to Karogoto, now in his first year at Ngunguru he of course delivered here. Some of the challenges he faced at Karogoto, with the pulping and drying sections being set far apart causing some problems with flow and efficiency, are not an issue at Ngunguru where everything is set up in one compound. The water access is good here, he’s happy with the equipment and the staff works hard, so he’s excited about the harvest and his main aim is to improve the payouts to the farmers.

We talked at length about processing methods in other countries like El Salvador and Ethiopia, and the disadvantages and benefits within each country’s traditions. In the busy mid harvest weeks at Ngunguru, cherries are picked in the morning and delivered up until about 4pm. They have 2 pulpers from 1975, one 4 disc and one 3 disc, each disc capable of pulping 1000kg/hr. Pulping continues through the evening, and the parchment is channeled into the 14 fermentation tanks where they will stay for 16-24 with no water, till the mucilage feels ‘gritty’ and is considered ready to wash off. Through the washing channels the parchment is raked and pushed against the water flow to remove the sugars, before being filed into post soaking tanks where they will stay in water for another up to 24 hours, ensuring all remaining mucilage dissolves. If they are extra busy and capacity is filled, they can skip the post soak, but according to Franklin the research done in Ruiru says the post soak improves the taste. Once ready the parchment goes to the drying tables, where it is turned and cleaned continuously till ready for storage. The hand pickers get 200 KES per day to sort out the less than perfect parchment. Franklin reckons they have the capacity to do 1 million kg of cherry here in a year, but next for them now is the fly crop, which he expects to come in at about 100.000 kg.

Moving on we passed back through Karatina on the way to the Kangocho factory. As we pulled up to the gates we could smell the pungently fermenting cherry skin collected in the pulp tower where member farmers can to come collect compost for their farms. We were greeted by manager John Muriuki, who’s been there for 15 years and today oversees the collections from 950 member farmers. When they bring their pickings they have to sort on site; any unripe and overripe go back home with them, the nicely ripe ones go into tanks as Cherry 1, while the slightly overripe goes into tanks as Cherry 2. Cherry 2 will spend a shorter time in the fermentation tanks than Cherry 1 to compensate for the extra time spent ripening on the tree. Cherry 2 will also be dried, bagged and taken to the mill separately. There is no difference in the price paid to the farmers for the separation work, nor a set value difference for the coop in selling it separate other than what the cup quality might land auction prices at. It’s done purely out of a quality concern. We had a great chat about the differences in hand picking in Kenya and the machine picked coffees you see coming out of Brazil, and the various stages involved in sorting with either method to make sure the coffees are processed to their best potential. It involved some very bad drawings of rows of coffee trees and barely recognizable tractors, a lot of pointing and waving of arms, and a definite feeling that I should have tried harder in art class.

Kangocho did 1.049.000 kg of cherry this year, a huge jump from only 440.000 last year. Since they then received 133KES/kg they are expecting more this year, but I think they’ll be receiving a fair bit less than that. Through a 4 disc pulper and 17 fermentation tanks they do a roughly 12 hour dry fermentation, wash the coffee into the next row of tanks for another 4 hour dry ferment, before washing it into a post soak of about 16 hours more. Once ready the parchment will spend a couple of hours on skin drying tables before being moved to the final tables. 6 of the 12 skin drying tables at Kangocho are in great need of replacing, a job that John recons will cost about 500.000 KES. It seems a lot to me, for that sum I’d think he could change all 12 tables and a bit more, but either way I hope if I come back next year I’ll see some improvements having been made.

The final drying tables were mostly empty but a couple were filled with parchments which based on moisture metering and the experience of John’s nose and hands would be ready by that evening. We were a bit confused by this as the parchment seemed fairly heavy still, but tuns out that instead of always drying the coffee to 12% export immediately, here they sometimes will dry the coffee down to 14 %, then place it in conditioning bins for a few weeks- or months- as we were a bit concerned to discover. The idea of this is to let the moisture equalize in all the parchment should it have dried unevenly, before taking it out to the tables again to get them to 12% in preparation for shipping to the mill. As we walked through the conditioning warehouse it didn’t immediately seem to smell or feel as if the coffee was being adversely affected by being stored here at slightly elevated moisture levels, but I’d still rather see all this parchment dried till finished and moved to the mill where atmospheric conditions are a bit better suited for longer term storage.
 
The third and last factory we visited today was a long term favourite for us; Tegu. Grace Walugulu who has been managing this factory for years has just retired, and in her place as of ten months ago is now Mike Mwangi, a young guy who has been a machine operator at Tegu for the last 10 years. Mike had actually been accompanying the truck I’d seen delivering the 250 Tegu bags at CKCM earlier that day, making sure everything arrived safely and in good condition. Tegu have also doubled their production this year, processing 564.000 kg cherry, up from 234.000 kg last year. Tegu has 3 remote collection centres and covers farmers up to 6km away, and Tegu has always been one of the best paid factories in Kenya. They have 18 fermentation tanks in two rows, the top row is where the parchment spends its overnight dry fermentation before being scrubbed with water and moved down to the second row of tanks for further fermentation. The timings spent here are very dependent on weather conditions. In the past the rule was that the whole process should take 72 hours from start to finish, but now it’s done more by feel- you have to know by experience what the correct timings are at any stage of the processing. During the fly crop when the weather is cooler, both fermentation and soaking will usually take longer.

Once deemed ready, the parchment is pumped underground to the skin drying tables, which slope down on a hillside. Once the water between the parchment and the green bean is gone, the coffee is bagged into sisal and carried up to the drying tables on the flatter section of Tegu. The tables here, as at most of the factories it seems, were in fairly shabby shape, most of them built out of wood that of course warps, splits and breaks with wear. One of Mikes long term plans is to get funding to replace all the wood tables with metal tables, cheaper to build and longer lasting but still a big investment at about 30.000 KES or £230 per table. He hopes to be able to change over 5-10 tables per year over the next 5-10 years, till they are all replaced.

We’re now back in Nyeri and staying at the lovely Outspan, where with the lack of dogs so far, I’ve made friends with this chap instead! Aptly named: Peacock!

About the course:

The SCAA Instructor Development Program is one of our most popular professional development programs. Coffee Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) get to be students as they learn about applied adult learning concepts in the workplace, including instructional design (based on the ADDIE model developed by the American Society for Training & Development), testing, and presentation skills. Upon completion of the one-day program, students earn the SCAA Lead Instructor Credential and are eligible to volunteer as an Instructor for SCAA. Many students also report an increase in skills pertaining to training and instructional design in their own companies after completing the IDP.

The course is being run twice, and there are limited tickets for each day:

March 2nd (Friday)

March 3rd (Saturday)

Because SCAA are dealing with ticketing you’ll need to sign up for their website.  This is like signing up for a forum – it does not sign you up for an SCAA membership.

The course will be held in London and the venue confirmed very soon.

Oh, Kenya, Kenya, Kenya. I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to come back here, ‘cause your coffees are delicious and your land is beautiful. Maybe it was the Nairobi traffic that put me off, cause in all fairness, it’s still atrocious! But in spite of spending yesterday green with food poisoning (thanks Virgin Atlantic) I couldn’t be happier to be back during a very interesting year for Kenyan coffees, with the harvest being the biggest they’ve seen in a good few years; more than double of last year. Last year prices were also through the roof with very little coffee available and a C at dizzying heights, but this year the C is settling back down a bit and with cherry supply so rich; the farmers’ expectations of even better prices this crop is unrealistic and a hard expectation to manage for the marketing agents.

The system in Kenya is unlike most countries in that the majority of coffee is sold via auction, although there is a second window open for buying outside of this platform should you want to/be able to. Growers are typically small with shambas of 0.5 to 1 hectares and perhaps as little as 50 trees each, so they pool their coffee together at their local factories; wet mills that buy the cherry and process it to exportable parchment, then sell it via marketing agents to exporters.

The first day of cupping was spent with Dormans who have helped us find and bring in many of our favourite Kenyas over the years. I’m traveling with Ben from San Francisco and Mie from Vancouver, and having sent through a wishlist of coffees to try before arrival we got straight to it alongside the wonderful Bridget, Kennedy and Daniel. Amidst the 4-500+ samples they cup every day just checking auction samples, arrivals and stock, you feel quite daunted by the speed and palate fatigue about to conspire against you while people like Bridget breeze in and out sipping through the cups calling out scores. It’s pretty full on but the lab is set up to run like clockwork, led by John and Dixon in charge of each their 5 and 4 barrel Probat sample roaster, churning out impressively precise and consistent roast levels. I panic if I have to run more than 2 of my 5 barrels at a time, so someone like John, who now close to retiring has been doing this for over 30 years, really makes me want to do better. I’m not sure I could ever do what the cupping team does every day though, the acidic coffees just dry out your tastebuds so fast- taking breaks have never been so needed and effective.

Before they even get to the roasting you have Wilson checking every sample of green that come in from the warehouses, screening 100 grams to find out if the bean sizes really are what they say on the bag. I had a little go myself and to my surprise one of the samples being marketed as a AA, only contained 40% beans at screen 18+, the rest being a manky mix of small beans, shells and debris. This is not to say that that 40% of actual AA would not be delicious, but you have to leverage your price if bidding on a lot like this to reflect the fact that once you’ve cleaned it up at your own mill you’re left with more than half of the lot unsellable at AA prices.
Along the wall of windows looking out onto the lush gardens at Dorman, Sam and his crew will line up sections of 15-20 coffees at a time, two bowls of each sample holding 16 grams of coffee, pour the cups half full, steep them for 4 minutes before giving them a quick stir and then top up with more water. After a skim and a wait till they’ve cooled, you cup and give your verdict, while the next flight of coffees is already steeping further down the table. And so it goes in stages, a constant circle of coffees roasting, grinding, brewing, cooling and cupping. There is no 24 hour rest after roasting, no sniffing of the grounds or the break, no cupping from hot through to cool, no elaborate note taking and deliberating over half points. While I tried to note down as quickly as I could what flavours I could find and what I might use the lot for, Bridget would frequently overtake me calling out her scores of 323, 233, 232/2, 223/4 and so on, to the assistant closely following her and writing the results into the auction catalogue.

The numbers are quick evaluations on three main categories of assessment:

Washed coffees:
Acidity:
Strong
Good (FAQ plus)
Reasonable (FAQ plus)
Light (FAQ minus)
Very Light
None

Body:
Heavy
Reasonable
Light
Very Little
None

Flavour:
Strong
Good
Some
Slight
Very little
None

Unwashed/Mbuni:
Acidity:
Slight
Light
Thin/None

Body:
Light
Medium
Heavy

Flavour:
Fair/Good
Fair
Slightly quakery
Slightly earthy
Harsh
Musty
Sourish
Potato
Fermented
Full earthy
Geil
Quakery

Given that 111’s are apparently a bit like unicorns, what we’d be hoping to find would be 222’s at best, and I was very excited to see what we’d get out of a sample of a recent delivery of Tegu which was on one of the tables in AA, AB as well as PB screenings. But it became apparent across this and many other factory lots that the AA’s aren’t really that popping this year and that the AB selections in many cases are as good or even better. There might be many reasons for this, an unusual growing cycle and large crop depleting or abnormally distributing nutrients, facilities at factories and mills struggling with the volumes causing less than ideal drying and storing conditions being two that I feel there must be most validity to.

After a brief lunch with Chris and Teya and a run down on the Dorman cafes remodeling plans, we returned for more cupping and a chat about Dorman’s plans for moving into other African countries, all which sounds very exciting and will be great to follow closely in the years to come.

TUESDAY

We squeezed in another cupping at Dorman in the morning, but as Tuesdays are the only auction days we only made two tables before having to head out. The auction takes place once pr week during the season, with a break in June and July and perhaps fortnightly auctions in the slow weeks either side of the summer holiday. The exporters receive samples of all the coffees to be auctioned off in the following week so they can cup, check the quality and plan for what they wish to bid on, then they head to the auction house and get their trigger finger ready to push the button that drives the prices up, a dollar at a time. It sounds a bit more exciting than it actually is, the room is a medium sized auditorium with a big screen hung up for all to follow the lots coming up, the prices as it goes up and the names of the winning bidders. Up to 50-70 traders might be in at a time, sat at their regular seats, and the bidding on a lot stops when only one trader is still pushing the button. (Apparently in Tanzania the bidding goes as longs as any button is pushed, so a single trader can effectively keep raising his bid by no letting go of the button fast enough, even if no one else is pushing theirs.) Each marketing agent has their slot in the day and the order rotates from week to week. Each marketing agent may also have any grade from AA through AB, PB, C, T, TT, UG or UG1 to sell (that’s for washed coffees, naturals are sold as MH- Mbuni Heavy and ML- Mbuni Light) so if you’re only interested in AA lots, but from several marketing agents, you quickly end up spending full days at the auction waiting for your lots to come up. I’m told it’s wise to pack a lunch and perhaps bring some magazines if you know you’re in for a long one, but even if you’re not actively bidding yourself- many traders will follow closely what everyone else is buying and what prices they go for, taking full advantage of the transparency this system offers.

While the auction room might not be the most thrilling place to sit and watch for hours on end, you could always go up to the sample room where they keep the bags of 21 kg green the mills send down every week via their marketing agents. They will also cup these samples and give some indication to the farmers on what prices hey should expect. The regular exporters can then each get 200g of these samples for their evaluations, and 160g are retained by the mill for reference in any arbitrations that might pop up after sale. After the auction is done, the winning exporter can go get another 500g to take back for further cupping and distribution to potential end buyers.
   
The benches and shelves of brown paper bags with outturn numbers, grade descriptors and lot size indications scribbled on them seemed to go on for miles in this place. In front of each bag a small tray with some of the contents is places so that any exporters can easily inspect the lots if needed. Macharia, who was prepping some trays as we arrived, gave me an auction catalogue and took me through some of the various grades to be found- it’s quite the contrast when you see AA’s and T’s or ML’s displayed next to eachother.

Today we also drove north towards Nyeri to visit the Central Kenya Coffee Mill, slowly creeping out of Nairobi in the middle of the horrendous Nairobi-Thika highway roadworks, burning rubber and rubbish along the wayside and trucks, motorcycles and fully stuffed mutatus making up traffic rules and lanes as they went along. Once into busy Zimmerman it got a bit more peaceful, burning scrap making way to furniture makers creating and selling their pieces, stalls overflowing with fruits and vegetables, building materials of every sort on offer and people seeking shade from the hot midday sun. Where the road has not yet been paved you drive through belts where the 10 meters of greenery on either side of the road is just covered in the red dust from the soil, and you have contrasts like huge apartment complexes being constructed across the road form fields of produce where women are hunched over in the scorching heat weeding and tending to their crops.

The first stop on the way was the CMS managed Yadini Estate near Ruiru, a fun looking little town where music playing on streetcorners and shops called things like ‘The Pork Place’ instantly made me take a liking to it. Yadini  was established in the early 1920’s and has 27 sections across 83 hectares, 7 of the plots SL, the rest Ruiru11 and a Batian plot in planning. Batian is a variety that was released in 2010, developed to have much the same resistance to pests as the Ruiru11 from 1985, but to cup at a quality more like the SL’s- and yield well of course. I’m wondering if I’ll be able to cup any on this trip, I’m generally careful about getting too excited or too skeptical about this sort of thing, but I’m always open to cup.

At Yadini we were greeted by their agronomist Hezron who guided us through a small section of the estate, explaining about their work. He filled us in on their tight routines in using fertilizers and fungicides, with leaf rust and coffee berry disease being the two main threats to the Kenyan coffee stocks. We also see some trees affected by berry moth, turning cherries black on the branch. Magnesium, lime, nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium etc is used to add the needed nutrients, and dug out divets between trees and rows ensure water can be retained and leaves and cuttings slowly compost. Bluegrass is grown betweeen rows helping to prevent erosion but also providing organic material. The murram soil here is so different from the spungy, soft, green carpets of undergrowth you see in many other countries, it’s so hard and barren, dusty and dry, it’s not hard to see why they need to invest a lot of money into fertilizers here. But the trees all look healthy and strong, capped at 6 feet tall as this is how high the arm on the tractor spraying fungicides will go, and of course it makes it easier to pick the top of the trees without having to use ladders. Some of the trees on this farm have absolutely massive trunks at the base, very old root systems that have expanded over the years as pruning has kept the upwards growth young for carrying good yields. The practice of stumping here is done differently for the Ruiru and the SL, as one has a denser growth than the other and benefits more from better access to sunlight. For the Ruirus, two main mama trunks are kept on the tree. At 7 years, one of them is stumped, leaving the one mama still producing while 2 new shoots are allowed to develop from the root. After another two years, the old mama is chopped off and the two young branches are allowed to continue on to 7 years, when one of them will be cut, etc etc. For the SL’s, three mamas are the standard, two being cut at 7 years and three new ones allowed to come up, then at 4-5 years the remaining old mama is cut. Pruning is a main concern here to keep the yield up, and June is the time when Hezron will know if the pruning has been successful, if the crop is looking to be a good one, and how much money he needs to find in his budget to finance the feed for the needs of his trees.

Besides the soil here being different, another thing we’re not seeing much is shade trees. Herzon did feel he had a good number at Yadini, but they were nothing like we’re used to seeing, and certainly too few to be very effective in doing the job they’re supposed to. They also prune these trees from the bottom up, removing the branches that would be doing the shading best in the first place. A lot of these trees are not just grown for shade though, they also get used for timber when they reach a certain height, and so you might have to choose if you want to prioritize shade or the option of another income stream. I feel like there must be a compromise but hey, I don’t know anything about native Kenyan trees so can’t really suggest anything.

In the nursery we come across the 10 000 Batian seedlings and young trees that are being  planted here as well as being sold to neighbouring farms at 30KES/tree. As for other varietals Hezron has some knowledge of the K7, but other then slightly longer branches he considers it similar to the SLs and so not of any use in replanting here. Yield is obviously of key importance and some of the data from the Coffee Research Station in Ruiru show Batian to outperform Ruiru by 0.5 tonnes per hectare. They averaged about 1400kg pr hectare last year, and this year leveled at 2 tonnes/hectare. Pickers are paid 60 schilling per debe, a 20 liter bucket that holds about 14kg of cherry. These are tipped into collection tanks before the full days harvest is pulped, and dry fermented for about 10 hours. After going through the washing channels the parchment is soaked overnight to improve the colour of it, an argument I don’t fully understand the reasoning behind but somehow it has beneficial results on the cup so then I guess we’re all good. This soaking water is changed every 6 hours to avoid over fermentation, and the water is re-used to pulp the next day’s pickings. Once out of the soaking tanks the parchment needs to lose its skin water within a few hours to prevent rotting, and the total drying period would be 6-12 days; weather dependent. If the weather gets too hot they have the option of covering the beds with netting to prevent the parchment from cracking, but down here in Ruiru it’s so hot I’m sure they must struggle to shade it enough at times.

Driving on to Thika we made a brief visit in to see Sustainable Management Services, who represented a few of the coffees we had last year and are doing some in depth and  fascinating work out here. Julius and Charles were very good to see us even if we were an hour late, and still able to give us a great overview of the company structure so that we can cup with them back in Nairobi and have a better idea of how their chain of custody works. With their own dry mill just being finished off now they’ll have a fly crop to test all the logistics before the next full crop comes in, and people are expecting it to be as big as or even bigger than this year.

We had a deadline to get to the Serena Mountain Lodge before the park gates closed so Zachary our driver spared no effort in getting us there on time, out of Thika (who refer to themselves as The Birmingham of Kenya!) as school children were being herded along by their teachers, people carrying or ferrying firewood on their bikes to cook dinner with, and taxi motorcycles with three people piled up, blasting music as they rode along grinning and having the best time with it. We hit Karatina at about 5pm, took the obligatory picture of Hotel Starbucks, and continued north to the Mount Kenya National Park. At 2195 masl we pullet up to a beautiful lodge hotel where we were to spend a night just surrounded by trees, animals, and a bunch of safari clad bird watchers. It’s pretty chilly up here so I declined the offer of being woken up in the night should any wildlife come down to the nearby waterhinghole, and after a lovely dinner I’m just pleased to have crawled into bed before nine to find a hot water bottle at the foot end.

The last day at Wahana started with a guided tour of the fields, having a closer look at the Andong Sari which is now in its 2nd year of producing. It’s a Javanese hybrid that have good yields there, but so far it looks like it bears a bit less fruit in the Sidikalang soil. It’s the only plot of Andong Sari in Sumatra so I’m curious to see if it’ll be on the cupping table tomorrow. They also took us to the 600 Costa Rican Caturra trees, who have yet to produce a significant crop after 4 years. I was quite excited to see 1250 Villa Sarchi trees as well, but these area also slow to produce, 4 years in and only a few cherries so far. If it cups well when it does mature, they will expand the lot, and they might prune the trees a bit next year as they’re looking a bit busy at the moment. The cherries I tasted were really sweet and quite fruity, so I’m excited to keep an eye on this one. All the different varietals here came from the Jember Research Centre in Java where the three Wahana agronomists have also received training. They’ve also been able to travel to Vietnam to learn about their coffee, and I hope at some point they’ll also be able to travel to Central America to see processing there.

Education is high on the priority list at Wahana, they are in fact building a coffee school there this year where growers can come to learn about shade trees, nurseries, planting, pruning, cupping etc. The building will hold bedrooms and kitchens for those who will travel from afar, a cupping lab and a lecture hall, and be within walking distance of the mill as well as the different varietal plots. It will be free for the farmers to attend and they will be bussed in from local ares first, then they will look into inviting farmers from further afield. The government have promised to assist in spreading the offer as far as possible, and Wahana hope to be able to teach 3 day courses for 50 people at least once per week. The training modules will be taught by the agronomists on site, and a couple of international companies are assisting in developing comprehensive contents. All this will of course cost money to build and run, and they’re welcoming any donation towards the $220.000 building at first, and then funds to keep the program going. One of the urgent subject to cover is the importance of planting shade trees, as since illegal logging has taken out a lot of the natural shade forest raising the temperatures, the pesky coffee borer beetles have been spreading very fast. While some help has been offered to distribute methanol/ethanol traps for the beetles, the root of the problem needs to be fixed and for a few years the government have driven campaigns to make the areas around Lake Toba green again, replanting the trees that were logged with no consideration for the environmental impact.
We head off to another farm where we later on get to see first hand another pest problem that Wahana hope to be able to find a solution for through their experiments and research. We meet with the farmer (he has 2 hectares himself) and collector Silalahi who gets cherry in from 7 groups of 30 farmers each, each of them with farms of about 10 hectares. He took us to the farm of Mr. Symbolan, who was in fine spirit in spite of his trees being affected by red stem borer, a larvae that eats its way from the ground up through the trunk of the tree, causing the stems and branches to wilt and/or break easily, and increases susceptibility to other pest and diseases. Young trees may die while older trees tend to survive, and there is no known chemical or biological cure at this time. Incidents tend to be less where there is good shade, and until preventative measures can be taken or a defense is found, infected trees should be taken up and burned.

This was the last farm we got to visit so we headed north back to Medan and said goodbye to our very brave and skilled driver Johnson and his assistant Ronnie, who were super sweet and had both put on the tshirts I gave them earlier in the week! Tomorrow we visit the Sarimakmur dry mill and do some cupping which I can’t wait for. I’m really  looking forward to tasting all the coffee I’ve been snapping pics of for the last few days, and have high hopes for some tasty beans!

FRIDAY

Last day doing coffee in Medan, tomorrow I return home. Today the trip went to Sarimakmurs mill in Medan, where their coffee is finished for export. We’re greeted by the owners Mr Suryo Pranoto, his wife Maria Gorethy and son and manager Andry, who poured us a cup of coffee, fed us Chinese New Years cookies (it’s not till Monday but Maria likes to start the cookies early) and explained more about the story of Sarimakmur. Having dealt in spices, cocoa and sweetpotato for many years, they only began trading in coffee in 1994, currently exporting 14.000 tons of coffee per year. They started roasting as Opal Coffee 15 years ago, also importing some coffee from other producing countries to diversify their blends. They opened a cafe in Sydney in 2010 and just three months ago they started the Opal Cafe in Medan, in the building that used to be the family home. In the middle of all this came Wahana, after the local government contacted Suryo to see if he would be interested in taking on the land to produce coffee. Other than a little bit of maize and cabbage there wasn’t much there, so they brought in agronomists from Jember to analyze the soil and climate to establish whether the area would be well suited for coffee. After positive reports they began clearing the land, leaving/planting shade trees where needed, and bringing in varietals to experiment with.

The way they want to move growers away from delivering wet parchment to delivering cherry means that they have to spend a lot of time on the ground building relationships, and it limits them to focusing on one area at a time. Expansions are however in the pipeline, they already have one facility in Sulawesi and are currently planning a wet mill for cherry in Toraja. The quality of the Kalosi they saw last year as very disappointing and they wish to gain better control over the process there, as they have for example in Lintong and Sidikalang. The problems arose from bad weather conditions causing a very low yield, meaning the growers would pick even green cherry and somehow ferment it in order to make it soft enough for them to pulp- devestating the quality in the cup.  Hendry our guide will be spending 9 months there this year to oversee developments, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what they will create, as the ‘regular’ Kalosi from them was quite nice 3-4 years ago. East-Timor, Flores and maybe even China might be next, these guys certainly are ambitious but seem to genuinely care about quality and moving the industry to a better place. They currently have about 10.000 employees across all sectors, about 1000 of them located at the HQ where we’re visiting.

After a long chat and exchanging of presents we went for a tour of the coffee warehouses, which were busy and in full production mode meaning we were able to have a good look at all the various stages. Except for the Wahana coffee, which is already density sorted in the Sidikalang mill, coffee starts off going through the density grader, continues on to the colour sorters (they can do 15 tons/hr) and through all the other various tubes and channels and sorters a dry mill contains. In a way many mills are all the same, but I really enjoyed the open, airy feel of this one, and the friendly vibe from the staff who were happy to chat and answer questions, and let me get very much in the way to take pictures. The ladies hand sorting had as much great fun watching and taking pictures of the pale, blonde visitor as I had taking pictures of them and trying my hand at sorting out the defects, the mood was really good and everyone was smiling and laughing, gossiping away over the tables. There were probably 6-700 women in that day by the conveyor belts and sorting tables, but in peak season there could be double that in a day over a couple of shifts. They get paid by the amount of defects they pick out of the green, 1 kg pays 500 rupiahs. Andry told me they start out with the greens from the mechanical sorters which only cleans the coffee up to about 25-30% defect, then depending on the grade they’re selling; single, double or triple-pick out anything down to zero defect which would be the requirement for roasters like us. Normally they do about 10-15 kg each in a day, but they could also do to up to 60 kg on a good day, perhaps if the coffees come in particularly rough looking!

After a brief chat with head roaster Ian and a mutual understanding that of course Probats are the best, we went up to the lab for a cupping of the various Wahana varieties, something I’d looked forward to all week! Having spent 4 years in a lab myself I was pleased to see a bunch of girls rocking the room, between Arina, Yuanita, Dani and Ani they had the space set up pretty sweet, two sample roasters, an espresso machine, samples galore, and two great comfy tables to cup on. They cup here daily checking preship, landed and processing samples, and we were about to try 10 fairly young samples of Wahanas last harvest from Nov/Dec. Dianto, another of Suryo and Marias children and agronomist at Wahana, answered my queries about a sample of peaberries I found on the counter (you may remember my wistful hoeps for more Indo PB’s in the previous post). He actually told be that he prefers drinking the peas himself over other grades, but as they only account for about 6% of production they’re not currently worth separating out for export- although I hope that one day will change. (hint hint if you read this Dianto!)

Equipped with cupping sheets we set about evaluating the coffees, and I thought I’d summarize briefly here what I found. I picked up a few samples to take back with me and I’ll make sure I get the rest sent over and hopefully I can put on a cupping of them all in London too, when they’re a bit more rested and I have more time to go in depth on the flavours.

The coffees:

Wahana Estate Washed: their ‘house blend’, super bright, crisp and clean, very nice ‘Indonesian’ character (which I think is important to preserve- all parts of the world shouldn’t taste the same!), herbal, cooled a bit rough but more due to young greens, not at all bad greens.

Wahana Estate Pulped: very pleasant texture, clean and sweet, fruity notes and long aftertaste, plums and cherries. Liked this a lot!

Wahana Estate Natural: watermelon, fruity as naturals are, quite a light texture, some indo character left underneath, might need a bit more rest of just a bit more cleaning to really shine, but great potential.

Rasuna: this was the one they’re rolling out all over Wahana so I hoped it would be good, and it was quite ok. A little uneven perhaps but some fruity characters, slightly savoury and nicely textured. Very decent coffee, but nothing wildly charming.

Jantung: probably my least favourite on the table an very much what many people unfortunately dismiss a lot of Indonesian coffee with: woody, rough and dry, some spicy notes but little sweetness and a lack of acidity. I was told this was a tricky one to roast and perhaps it could perform better under lighter circumstances, but I don’t feel the roast was noticeably too dark so my issues were with the bean itself.

Andong Sari: ah the Andong Sari, the coffee I bought last year from its first harvest and couldn’t work out how to roast to be a coffee I’d want to sell. Annoyingly, or thankfully, I really enjoyed this 2nd harvest sample, it was round and clean and had some soft stonefruit, spice and chocolate to it.

USDA: supposedly this is an Ethiopian line brought in by some Americans in the 50′s, but I found it to have little in common with Ethiopian coffee, perhaps a bit Harar-y if anything. A bit grainy, dry, with some tobacco and whisky, it was woody and while not directly unpleasant one of the only two on the table that I outright disliked.

Costa Rica: I quite like this cup, some confusion over the samples means I don’t know which of the Costa Rican varietals it was but I found it to be clean, crisp and a bit floral, very nice indeed.

Longberry: It didn’t blow my skirt up but everyone here raves about it, and I guess I can see that the boozy fruit and lush texture would be pleasing to many. I’d want to try this again in a couple of months on a slightly lighter roast perhaps, it just felt a bit closed off but I think it could grow on me.

Toraja: This felt like the standard Indonesian coffee I’d expect, just cleaner! A bit generic perhaps but very inoffensive, full bodied and a bit spicy. Just ok.

So in conclusion, I was really pleased to find a lot of the coffees to be much better than most things I’ve had from Indonesia, and to be very varied as I’d hope and expect. Will I try to buy any of these, like the Andong Sari, again? I’d love to but I don’t know. I would perhaps wait till grainpro or vacpacks become available as shipping options, as I think with Indo coffees, which I generally find to drop off very early after harvest, it’d give me the added confidence that nothing gets tainted or ruined in transit and storage or changed by too rapid water movements in the green. I’d also love to not have coffees machine dried, but weather and facility conditions here might not be suited for a lot of raised bed and patio. I hear Aceh has some raised beds tho, which is interesting.

Leaving the mill we headed over to the newly opened Opal Cafe, and were greeted by manager Michael who made sure we were very well looked after by the lovely crew. I had to try the Wahana Wayag, a varietal I hadn’t heard mentioned till today- turns out there is so little of it they’ve decided to make it an Opal Cafe exclusive. Which is annoying, cause I was told it was an Ethiopian strain and the pourover I had Alfian make me, even if it was of the espresso roast and quite roasty with it, I could still tell it was yummy underneath! Perhaps if I twist someone’s arm I can get a sample across to try on a lighter roast…

I also had the pleasure of chatting to Resi from the Indonesian Specialty Coffee Association, a young group that are working to raise awareness and the profile of Indonesian coffee both to their internal market and internationally. Having exhibited at the SCAA show for the last 5 years they will this year do their first show in Vienna, so I look forward to seeing her again there and to hopefully share with her any Sumatran or other Indonesian coffee I may have bought by then!

So now I’m headed home full of impressions and a few fewer questions,  and a greater understanding of the challenges and opportunities for Indonesian coffee. Terima kashi to Hendry and Finn especially, growers, millers, hosts, fellow travellers, guides, drivers and animals big and small- it’s been a trip!

After a few hours of sleep at Wahana (jetlag and barking St Bernards are not a good combo!) we set off to visit more farms, heading north to Merek. A trip that should have taken an hour took two as we were low on gas and had to go through three gas stations before we found one with fuel on offer. But eventually we pulled up on a bumpy country lane and met Mr. Ginting, a farmer and collector who gathers cherry from 50 local growers as well as his own half hectare plot where he’s growing a mix of mature and young trees. He sells to Wahana who sends trucks to collect the cherry, ensuring that the time from harvest to processing is kept to a minimum. The plot we’re visiting belongs to one of his suppliers and is a 0.5 hectare plot growing 7 year old Ateng. The owner doesn’t tend to prune these as the yield is higher at the top of the trees, so they’ve grown to their full 2 meters and they use ladders to pick from the top. Here also, the yield has been low in the last couple of years but this coming harvest is looking up.

I asked how the transition from selling the mills cherry instead of parchment has been for them, and Ginting explained that while selling parchment at the moment would have been financially more beneficial to him,   the general feeling is that selling cherry is less work than pulping themselves so the difference in price is outweighed by convenience. He currently pays the growers 8700 rupiah per kg, and sells it to Wahana for 8900, clearing 200 for his commission. This February he’s projecting to move about 7000 kg cherry per week from his 50 farmers. All of them are of course free to sell to one of the three other local collectors, just as Ginting is free to see to other mills than Wahana, but he has built up a loyalty with his suppliers and buyers that means he carries on with the new cherry procedures. One of the ways he secures supply is by pre financing the cherry, offering loans in advance against promise of supply. Quality wise there is no premium for riper cherries, but Wahana will accept under ripe lots only up to a certain sensible level so they know if they pick too many greens they might not be picked up. The growers generally avoid picking greens anyway, as they weigh less than ripe cherries and when picking greens the stem and future flower bud usually comes off the branch, destroying the next fruiting.

When asked if there would ever be a possibility to buy coffee just from this small group of producers, the answer was no, volumes not being high enough to warrant the extra work- but I hope that in time this attitude will change and that they put logistics in place to at least experiment with this.

Leaving the farm we drove to the sleepy fishing village of Tongging for lunch, and it turned out that we had to catch it ourselves so Alex and I clambered onto one of the floating fish pens where lunch was swimming around, net in hand. We caught about 8 big fishies to feed the crew, and I made sure to save half a fish for the hungry cats waiting to peruse out leftovers. Lunch was had  in a little wooden lookout pavilion by the water, to the sound of carpenters putting a new roof on the restaurant- the old one blew off  in a recent storm and was strewn in pieces on the other side of the road. The landscape climbing up and down from this little village was some of the nicest I’ve seen so far, I couldn’t get any pictures to do it justice but I promise you it was well nice!

Next up was a stop in at Mr Bayu’s farm in Simalungun, another grower and collector who gathers cherries for Wahana from 160 other producers. His own plot is 8 hectares and was started 4 years ago when his son Bau Jr was born. The 160 other farms range from 1-4 hectares, so this is quite a nice sized operator having started as a collector in 2009. We were a bit unsure about the varietal he is growing, he called it Caturra but it didn’t look like it to us, one suggestion was that is could be Sigarar-Utang, the ‘debt payer’. A high yielding plant, his crops have nonetheless been down by about 30 % the last two years, the last time he felt he had a 100% crop was 2010 when he did 10 tons of cherry per day from his 160 suppliers, over a 90 days harvest period. This year he hopes to be up by 5% again, to about 670 tons of cherry. He recently cut the undergrowth around his trees as part of routine maintenance work, and the trees looked full and healthy, not shade covered but not looking like they were too adversely affected by this. He showed us how the cherries mature starting from the tip of the branch ripening first, then the middle of the branch (where the mid harvest and best cherries sit-also where he chooses mother seeds from) to the cherries closest to the trunk where light is lower and ripening is slower.

Medan is hot and humid, not my favourite type of weather but if you’re into it I guess it’s nice to get a free steam bath every time you walk outside! I haven’t done as much research into Indonesian coffees as I would have liked to before coming out here, so opting for the hotel aircon and internet access while it’s available seems the ideal option. We’re heading to the Wahana Estate in Sidikalang west of Lake Toba, but taking the route east of the lake on the way south from Medan, stopping in Parapat and Lintong Nihuta on the way around. It’ll be a couple of days of travel before I get to any coffee and almost a week to cup anything, so for now I’m just looking forward to getting out of the city and start climbing into cooler altitudes, seeing what the landscape has to offer on the way. Sumatra is an incredibly green and fertile place, the plants, trees and wildlife here are unique, but it’s also lost about half of its tropical rainforest since the 80’s and many animal species are endangered. Only around 922 of the 17-18.000 islands that form Indonesia are inhabited,  with 45-50 million people (about 21-22% of the total population) living on Sumatra which is the largest fully Indonesian island of them all. Coffee wise Indonesia is roughly the 4th largest coffee producer in the world with about 7 million bags per year, but only 15-18% of the coffee is Arabica. More than 90% of the coffee is produced by smallholders with plots averaging 1-2 hectare, and are often just a part of the crops produced on a farmers land. As with any producing country you can of course get great, clean and fresh coffees out of here, but it’s not entirely unwarranted that Indonesian coffees don’t have the best reputation in the specialty sector. You have to know where to look and be patient in your search for the best lots, accept that traceability is not easy to define and be willing to pay a lot for the best selections. I’m curious as to what I’ll see here, as I’m visiting a farm that I tentatively bought just two bags from last year, but upon roasting them I never found a way to get them suited for release and so they never made it onto the offer list.

     
SUNDAY

The road out of Medan was bursting with colour and life today, the city gearing up for Chinese New Years and being the weekend it seems there were weddings being celebrated on every block. Lovely billboards spelling out the happy couples’ names in flowers were positioned on the sidewalks announcing the grand occasion, and people walking to and fro were sporting their Sunday best. Roadside food stalls selling every type of snack and treat you could wish for, and tuk tuks ferrying passengers, goods and food down the streets, weaving in and out of the chaotic traffic with considerable skill. Motorcycles seems to be the transport of choice for a cross section of people; lone riders, young couples as well as entire families with small kids all scooting along the loosely defined ‘lanes’ with impressively confident and casual maneuvers.

The Sunday pace slowed down as we reached the edges of town, and entered the flat, lush land towards Pancurbatu. Endless irrigated fields stretched for miles, neatly dug out into square plots of differing crops, people stood to their knees in water harvesting, replanting and repairing mudbanks. Geese and chicken traipsed around on the intermittent squares set aside for homes and front yards, people picking fruits and berries for their breakfast. After a couple of hours it felt like we started to climb a bit, the water soaked plains giving way to little rivers and waterfalls where children swam while their mothers did the laundry. Around Saribudolok fields of farmed palm trees started unfolding on either side of the road, an abandoned train track just visible past the neat rows. All along the way, beautifully built and adorned family grave sites stood as small monuments to lost loved ones, often built as mini traditional batak style houses with paintings of the deceased on the front. The fields of palm trees gave way to endless stretches of rubber trees, the bark stripped off in sections and a plug draining the latex into a little collection cup tied to the trunk. 4 hours into the drive and we climbed still higher, the road starting to wind and the vegetation changing to taller, slimmer trees whose leaves shone like glitter as they tumbled to the ground in the sun. Passing through a protected habitat for monkeys and being watched by them perched by the roadside, we finally caught the first glimpses of Lake Toba and started the small descent into Parapat on the Uluan penninsula where we’re staying the night.

In town we had the opportunity to go for a small wander, stumbling across parchment and green coffee drying in front yards and on sidewalks, even on the docks in the small Parapat harbour. From this village you can take the ferry to Samosir Island in the middle of the lake, both formed after a supervolcano erupted 75000 years ago. There used to be a narrow strip of land connecting the island to the side of the caldera, but they dug a canal through it so boats could freely circle Samosir. With only a bridge connecting Panguruan on the island with Tele on the main land, Samosir is now the largest island within an island in the world. Some coffee grows there and I’d love to one day be able to taste Samosir beans on their own, hopefully the industry will move towards lot separation down to such specifics, it’s be a better selling point than Kopi Luwak for sure.

MONDAY

Today we drove from Parapat on the east side of Lake Toba to Lintong on the south side, stopping in at the Sarimakmur dry mill that was built here a year ago. Driving up from the lake I finally got the first Sumatran coffee tree sightings, with several garden coffee plots planted right up to the sides of peoples homes, many front yards housing small nurseries of healthy looking seedlings. Hitting another long stretch of flat plains, more traditional Batak houses could be seen spread out in the water soaked fields where people tended their crops while their oxen grazed and tried not to get stuck in the mud. Again the road got steeper and we began another slow climb, until we started seeing coffee again and arrived at the Lintong Nihuta mill. Most people when thinking of Sumatran coffee will know the words Lintong and Mandheling but Lintong is the only one that actually bears some specific relation to a growing area. I believe it was just due to a misunderstanding with early traders, but Mandheling is loosely and named after the Mandailing people who grow a small amount of coffee in the Mandailing and Tapanuli regencies south of Lintong and Lake Toba, but is often given as a name to coffee from all over Northern Sumatra.

This mill receives wet parchment from the local growers, who pulp on their own farms using basic hand cranked pulping machines called luwaks. Instead of drying immediately they’ll usually keep the parchment in bags for a day or so until delivering it to the mill, and I was told they’re currently receiving IDR 29.000-30.000 per bambu (approx 1kg)- the cup used to measure volume of coffee delivered. It seems very high to me when I look at the numbers of other transactions, but perhaps something got lost in translation. The GBP equivalent is currently about £2.05-£2.10 This is quite an increase from 5 years ago when they might have received about IDR 13-15.000 (£0.92-£1.05) per kg of wet parchment. However, no differentiation is made for delivering more or less ripe or well picked coffee. When we arrived there were sacks of wet parchment sat on the warehouse floor that had been picked yesterday and delivered this morning. This coffee was to be processed by the traditional Giling Basah (wet grinding) method, which is quite unique for Indonesia and responsible for the coffees deep blue-green colour and particular taste profile. Giling Basah is also referred to as semi-washed, wet hulled or local process, and compared to other producing countries, the bulk of the drying period is spent without the parchment on the green. The chain goes a bit like this; farmers pulp on their farms and deliver the wet parchment to the mills the next day, the coffee is then spread out onto patios to dry for a day. Once down to about 30-40% moisture and still very soft (you see a lot of goat hooves in the coffee when the soft wet  greens are squished in the huller), the coffee is milled to remove the parchment, and becomes what’s referred to as ‘labu’- green but wet. The green coffee then goes back on patios to dry down to ‘asalan’, nearly dry at 16-18% but still unsorted, till finally it reaches 12% moisture and can be sent to the dry mill in Medan for final sorting, removal of foreign matter and grading. 3-400 tons of green comes out of this Lintong mill in a season.

I think before moving on I’m going to clarify a bit the various stages that coffee is traded at and how they relate to eachother, as talking about prices per kg when there are 4 different kg’s in opertaion can get a bit confusing. The numbers you’ll have to give and take a bit on, but roughly: 1 kg of cherry = 0.4kg wet parchment = 0.21 kg dry parchment = 0.18kg green, and 5kg cherry= 2kg wet parchment = 1 kg dry parchment = 0.9 kg green. I think. I’m going to confuse myself several times over this on this trip I’m sure!

The weather has been a bit unstable recently with light showers spread out during the day, which gave us a chance to see and smell first hand some of the particular challenges around processing coffee in Sumatra. If the weather doesn’t get sunnier, the bagged up parchment in the warehouse that arrived this morning will perhaps not be going onto the patios to dry for days yet. I stuck my hand into the bags and the coffee was already really hot and smelling of boozy fruit, essentially fermenting away and cooking in it’s own heat. I was told the coffee would stay in the bags for a maximum of three days, but there was no explanation for what would happen if it rained for weeks. Even after one day I thought the coffee must surely already be adversely affected by the wait. I remembered passing through a local village market seeing women sat on top of huge tarp bags of parchment with bambus, ready to sell to collectors, and I shudder to think of the chemistry going on inside that mass of coffee. Some finished green Rasuna in bags nearby smelled and looked ok, so perhaps the parchment offers some protection against the fermentation, I don’t know. On the patios some labu was spread out to dry, and as it started drizzling while we were there they quickly covered the greens with tarps- however I don’t think there was anything protecting the coffee from getting wet as rainwater soaked the patios and surely must have seeped in underneath. Blacks the dog kept me company as we peered out of the warehouse doors onto the wet patios. I’d love to see some polytunneled drying beds here in the future.

Moving on we headed to visit one of the local growers, Mrs Sihombing who has 3 hectares of Rasuna and Aceh varieties growing on her land. We walked around a plot of healthy looking trees while a couple of ladies picked the a few ripe cherries off the branches, being between the main (Oct-Nov) and fly (Mar-May) crop there wasn’t much cherry to see but a few flower buds and green cherries heralded the harvests to come. We had a demonstration of her luwak in action and the way she dries some parchment on tarps in her field, bundling them up for the rain. We also got to walk around her vegetable patch and pig pens accompanied by her little son Toto, who took little convincing to get stuck into my trusty kid ice-breaking balloons.

After a quick lunch break at a Lake Toba lookout point we finally made out way to the lovely Wahana Grana Makmur Estate in Sidikalang, an impressive farm and facility built by exporters PT Sari Makmur Tunggal Mandiri. They are a huge exporter with mills in Lintong, Medan, Surabaya and Lampung as well as the facilities in Takengon and Sidikalang. They represent a fair chunk of all Indonesian coffee exports, and have built Wahana as an experimental farm where varietals will be planted, growers educated and visitors hosted in order to move the industry forward.

We’re spending three nights here and I’m already making friends with the Wahana inhabitants. There are about 10 big, bouncing, slobbering St Bernard dogs and puppies romping around in a kennel by the main house, super excited to get fussings and almost getting their heads stuck in the fence trying to get closer to the lady feeding them toast she brought from the hotel in Parapat. Around the back of the staff quarters a pen full of rabbits hop up to the fence as I approach, and have a go at eating my skirt and shoes while I pick up one of the babies to get a cuddle in. Two small luwaks live in cages on the terrace, they look to be healthy and calm and I’m told they’re kept as pets and when awake at night can be picked up and held, but I don’t get the chance to for now. Going for a quick walk before it got too dark to see anything, it seems a very well organized place, trees look bushy and healthy and the ground is soft and spungy, shade trees tower over all the fields and the vegetable and fruit gardens are full of interesting, delicious looking produce.

         
TUESDAY

Cornel, one of the Wahana agronomist on site gave us a tour of the nursery, showing the stages of the plant from soldier to seedling and ready-for-the-field plants. They choose the best cherries they can get off the healthiest most productive trees, pulp them and wash the mucilage off the parchment, then sow them into neat rows under shade cover. After 3 months they germinate and at 7 months and 8-9 set of leaves they get planted into their permanent plots. They have about an 80% germination rate on the Rasuna plants they’re currently rolling out, but also have another 11 varietals planted across various experimental plots. For example they’ve brought the high yielding Jantung Aceh down from the north to see how it does here in Sidikalang, and if it’s successful they will roll it out to local growers as well. They’re also working on Longberry from Ethiopia to see how that fares, and have other plots of Andong Sari, Villa Sarchi, Toraja, Indian S795/Jember, Hibrido de Timor/Tim Tim, Caturra, Catuai, USDA and Tipica. They are currently focusing on planting new Rasuna, Toraja and Longberry, those being the three that are showing the best results taste wise. This year they are adding 20 hectares of Rasuna to the existing 190 hectares across 7 plots that they already have. The trees we’re seeing are only 1-5 years old, and have a lifespan of 25 years before the yield gets too low to be viable.

I’m not an expert on coffee growing what so ever and these trees are all planted in the last 5 years, but I was wondering if with all the shade trees on Wahana if the varieties of coffee that had very dense growth would struggle to get enough sun to produce well, and a lengthy discussion on pruning ensued. The custom here is to prune only from the top to keep picking hight at a sensible level, but with some of the compact varietals I’m thinking a bit of pruning throughout would be beneficial too. There seems to be little flowers and green cherry going on, and even in young trees I’d expect a little more this time of year. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops in the next 10 years, when I asked if they’d ever stump trees here it seemed a foreign concept- I think you prune from the top and replace the tree when it stops yielding well and that’s it. Hopefully Wahana will be the perfect place to experiment a bit!

Walking from the nursery up to the mill we passed workers cutting the undergrowth around the trees, something they do here twice per year to keep the nutrients going to the coffee roots, increase air circulation and water uptake, and providing natural compost. This mill differs from the one in Lintong by the fact that it receives cherry and not wet parchment, providing some increased control over the process and final result. It’s a novel approach and it took some convincing to get the local growers to part with cherry instead of pulping it themselves, and I still have to work on the maths a bit to find out if the prices they get paid for the two products compare. We were greeted by manager Frenmin, who took us through the process starting with cherries being dumped into a well in the floor and transported up to the first sorting machine. The cherries they were working on today were picked yesterday and brought in this morning, and are destined for local consumption. During peak harvest they have the growers pick in the mornings, truck the cherry in in the evening and pulp through the night. At the moment the farmers get paid 8-9000 rupiah per kg of cherry, compared to 4000 only two years ago. This has to do with the yield being low in the last few years, pushing prices up. Frenmin told me that they can move anything from 40-80 tons of cherry through here in a harvest season, and that of the 15% green coffee that leaves him with, only 8-10% will be of export quality.

The first stage for the cherry entering the processing machines at this mill is the pre-rinse that sorts out the sticks, stones, leaves and other foreign objects. The second stage is the wash and float, where the good, heavy cherries continue on while the bad, floating and green cherry gets channeled into a separate tank for internal consumption. The good cherry then gets pulped and gets floated again, sinking parchment on to the fermentation tanks and the floaters off for local drinking. Another channel separates the pulp and sends it off to composting, while any unpulped cherries; those that were too small for the machines and typically the peaberries, also head off destined for local consumption. (I’d quite like to see more peaberry from Indonesia, btw. It’s a shame they rarely see the value of it, but I was quite fond of our Toarco PB last year) The good parchment that made the grade is kept in fermentation tanks for 12 hours if it’s going to be semi-washed, and 16-18 hours if it’s going to be washed- weather dependent. I asked if they’d ever tried preparing pulped naturals, not fermenting but placing the mucilage covered seeds onto patios until 12% dry, but Frenmin had done this experiment and found the coffee to dry badly and ferment, so no luck on that. I hope at some point they’ll re-visit the idea with new techniques and equipment, but one project at a time I suppose! The fact that they do fully washeds here and not just Giling Basah is quite exciting in itself.

Still, whether semi or fully dried, it’s not quite what I know from other countries, semi dry only goes on the patio for a day before being hulled and returned outside to dry, while the washed dries on patios for a day, gets hulled, and then finished off in large mechanical driers. These tumble the cofee around in 35C heat, 12 hours a day for about a week, then the coffee is bagged up and sent to Medan for final grading. The driers hold about 15000 litres each, or 24 tons parchment/10-12 tons cherry. They do in fact also produce full naturals here by mechanical drying, same process as for the washed but spending up to 10 days in the drier before it reaches export levels of humidity. Mechanically dried naturals look quite different from sun dried naturals, and I hope I get to cup some later on in the week!
I asked if there was a local cascara or hoja, but it seems all pulp and husk gets composted or used as fuel. Since logging for fuel is illegal they have to burn the waste as well as buy in candlenut shells and palm kernel shells to heat the water that acts like radiator heating for the driers.

Finishing up our tour we continued on to visit another, smaller farm that has it’s own mill on site, processing for itself and neighbouring growers. We were greeted by Mr. Saragi who took us through some huge robusta trees that frames his coffee plot of 4 year old Ateng trees, where I found his rather wonderful mother Mrs Juliana Tarigen picking cherries and peering at us with curious eyes. I have to admit to my surprise she spoke English really well, having gone to school in Medan as a young girl and studied Dutch and English there. In spite of not having spoken the language for 60 years, we chatted away about her coffee, the chilies she was planting between the rows, her 8 (!) kids and the history of the farm. She bought it with her husband in the 60’s, ripped out all the old trees that were there and planted new stock, and 4 years ago her son added the mill to the farm, creating another income stream. She invited us into her home for coffee, and while it was being prepared we wandered over to the patios and mill to have a look. Farm hands were busy raking labu out on the concrete, while dogs were sunning themselves on the warm coffee. In the warehouse we could see the 150 million rupiah processing machine that Mr Saragi had invested in, allowing him to mill 500 tons of green coffee per year from his own and neighbours’ crops. Upon selling the green to the exporters he said making IDR 6000 per kg greens – which seems to me to be quite low so perhaps something got lost in translation again, but he’s very happy with his investment and they just build a brand new, beautiful house where we then went to have coffee in. Sitting around on mats, watching Juliana prepare her chewing tobacco while sipping the hot, sweet, truly home made coffee, I kinda had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. This tiny little old lady with the cheeky smile and sparkly eyes was just too magical and sometimes unexpected people and my job are just the best in the world.

This is a seriously delicious coffee, still vibrant and full of pink grapefruit, crisp apple and berry notes.