For our third and final coffee release from Indonesia this year, we’re bringing it back to Sumatra, one of the oldest coffee growing regions in the world. Sumatran coffees are most well known for their low acidity, heavy body, and often-times polarizing earthy notes. Their flavors are a result of wet hulling, or giling basah in Bahasa Indonesia: a processing method that originated in Indonesia and is almost exclusively done in the country due to high humidity. In the wet-hulled process, cherries are depulped, and beans are placed in tanks or bags to be fermented, washed, and partially dried. Still soft, the protective parchment encapsulating the bean is removed using a mechanical separator, then fully dried. This process shortens the overall drying period, tames acidity, and increases the body in the coffee. While there is a place in the hearts of many for mild, viscous, earthy coffees, it’s not a flavor profile that Andytown has traditionally leaned towards, so we’ve avoided wet-hulled coffees until now.
Goodel Indonesia meeting with some members of the Soripada Women’s Groups of Poda in Sidkalang, North Sumatra. There are 6 women’s groups that make up Soripada, with a total of 290 farmer members.
Goodel Indonesia was established in 2016 by Issac Lee, and is a social enterprise that works directly with coffee producers primarily in Sumatra and Aceh to provide high quality, traceable coffee to the international market. Issac is Korean but grew up in Indonesia, and our contacts Drew Burnett, Director of Goodel, and Jen Green, who provides QC/QA support, are foreigners who have lived and worked in Southeast Asia for quite some time. As foreigners, they don’t want to take up space and fill roles that Indonesians can effectively fill. So instead, Goodel focuses on quality improvement through producer empowerment by working with already established mills and helping them prepare coffee for export. They work to understand producer challenges and deliver targeted support to improve coffee quality and consistency.
One of the longest standing relationships Goodel has is with Poda, a social enterprise lead by Samuel Sihombing. Samuel is a former pastor in the local protestant church who has become a community leader and coffee visionary in Sidikalang near lake Toba. He left his position at the church to help build the community by improving the production and marketing of coffee and other crops like cacao in the area. Poda works with farmers to organize and manage groups, which provide a platform for agronomy and other training to improve coffee quality.
Samuel Sihombing, leader of the Poda social enterprise, at a coffee farm
Drew explains that wet hulled Sumatran coffees are most often regional blends, whether the buyer knows it or not. Exporters in Medan, Sumatra will receive coffees from throughout the highlands of Aceh and North Sumatra, along with coffees from other islands like Java, Bali, Sulawesi, and Flores, and blend them to build a more reliable and repeatable flavor profile for coffee buyers. Although this practice is rarely spoken of openly, it serves an important value-adding purpose, helping to provide a consistent cup year after year. Fair Trade-certified cooperatives in Sumatra also engage in similar practices, but registered farmer groups are often scattered throughout the region. These coffees are certainly still specialty, but they falls short of communicating meaningful information about the place they were produced and who produced them.
Poda takes a different approach to coffee. They only source coffee from the Dairi regency, near Lake Toba, and more specifically from the three districts of Sitinjo, Sumbul, and Sidikalang. These three districts are the homeland of the Pakpak people, a subgroup of the Batak people, where farmers grow coffee on their farms with other cash crops. Coffee is not their sole source of income, often intercropping with oranges and chilis, and dedicating separate land to vegetables. Poda works with farmers to organize and manage groups. An important part of this is improving financial management, so the groups are often built around a community savings and loan group, helping to give the farmers more financial autonomy and break cycles of debt owed to middlemen.
Poda buys freshly-pulped coffee—gabah in Bahasa Indonesia—directly from the producer groups to improve coffee quality and to ensure that more of the coffee’s market value is returned directly to the farmer. Farmers receive a higher price than the market rate for their coffee, and a part of this increased margin goes into the community savings and loan fund. The gabah is then taken to the Poda facility just outside of Sidikalang, where the coffee is partially dried before it is hulled, then dried again before being hand-sorted, blended, and packed for shipment. This coffee comes from women’s groups that Samuel began organizing several years ago. Recently, they started calling coffee from the women’s groups “Soripada” which translates to “wise women” in the local Batak language. There are 6 women’s groups that make up Soripada, with a total of 290 members.
Drew (not pictured) meeting with some members of Soripoda Women’s Groups. On the table is a plate full of large, ripe coffee cherries to show what kind of cherries they are harvesting. To the right of the table are some traditional sweets wrapped in banana leaves, alongside some water and some brewed coffee. It’s customary in Indonesia to offer beverages and snacks when hosting any guests.
We’re excited about this coffee for many reasons: it’s traceable down to a specific region in Sumatra, the partners we work with are doing what they can to ensure that producers are receiving support and better pay for their hard work, and the coffee is really quite unlike most wet-hulled coffees we’ve come across. In our initial sample evaluation, we picked up fruits high in citric acid, like pomelo, kiwi, mango and grapefruit, but also some notes of cedar and clove. We did sample roasts to determine the best way to approach this coffee. At first, we thought of highlighting the acidity of this coffee and creating a really bright roast, but it didn’t feel right. We were at home with the complexity we found in taking a slower roast approach, developing sugars and striking a balance between brightness and spicy, earthy notes.
This coffee reminds us of galangal—a sweet, floral, and peppery root related to ginger and often used in Southeast Asian cooking—dried fig, and lapsang souchong—a smoked tea that has a strong, smoky aroma but a delicate, sweet tobacco-like flavor. The acidity is not necessarily sharp, but it is pronounced throughout the entire drinking experience, even when the spicy notes come through. It’s a complex, sophisticated yet still grounding coffee, and is great on it’s own, but could also do well with a little milk and honey. If you’ve never been a fan of spicy, earthy coffees, give this one a try. We’ve had several of our baristas say this is one of the most interesting and well-balanced coffees they’ve ever had!