One of the things I love most about the coffee industry is meeting all the folks who have come into the profession from all sorts of backgrounds. As someone who jumped into coffee later in life, it's encouraging to see others bring their skills, knowledge, and experiences from their previous non-coffee roles and use them to make the coffee industry better. That includes Samuel Sihombing, the Founder and Leader of Poda Agro Group.
We learned about Samuel’s coffee a few years ago through Kopi Kedaya (formerly Goodel Indonesia), a social enterprise that works directly with producers in Indonesia to provide high-quality, traceable coffee to the international market. Kopi Kedaya has worked with Samuel since 2016, helping Poda Agro Group improve their facilities and coffee quality assessment capabilities, secure financing to reach exportable scale, and identify international buyers interested in their coffee.
Samuel was a former pastor at a local church. He left his position after realizing he could use his community organizing skills and help uplift the community by improving the production and marketing of coffee and other crops in the area. Samuel has become a community leader and coffee visionary in Sidikalang, and has been recognized on multiple occasions for his work in making the coffee trading system more sustainable.
Kopi Kedaya meeting with some members of the Soripada Women’s Groups of Poda in Sidkalang, North Sumatra. There are six women’s groups that make up Soripada, with a total of 290 farmer members.
Although rarely promoted as such, Sumatran wet-hulled coffees are most often regional blends. Exporters in Medan, Sumatra, will receive coffees of varying quality throughout Sumatra and other islands, and will blend them to build a more reliable and repeatable flavor profile for coffee buyers. While this helps provide a consistent cup year after year, it falls short of communicating meaningful information about where the coffee was produced and by whom.
Poda takes a different approach, sourcing coffee from over 700 farmers residing within three districts in the Dairi Regency: Sitinjo, Sumbul, and Sidikalang, which is also the regency’s capital and is more often used as the name of the region. These areas are home to the Pakpak people (a subgroup of Batak people). Here, farmers rely on growing coffee and other fruits and vegetables for income. Farm sizes are small, with coffee trees covering an average of less than one hectare. Poda works with farmers to organize and manage groups, which provide a platform for agronomy and other training to improve coffee quality. Improving financial management is key, and groups are often built around a community savings and loan. This gives farmers more financial autonomy and breaks cycles of debt owed to middlemen.
Over the past few years, Samuel has also organized six women’s producer groups in Sidikalang. Poda buys freshly-pulped coffee–gabah in Bahasa Indonesia–directly from the 290 women producers. 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.
Samuel with a bag of our first release of the Sidikalang Poda Women’s Group coffee in 2021. That was the first year that the women’s group coffee was exported to the US, and when Drew and Jen of Kopi Kedaya came to Andytown for a visit later that year, they took a bag of coffee back to Samuel. Whenever possible, we try to send a bag coffee back to producers so they can taste how we roasted their coffee!
Wet-hulling is a processing method that originated in Indonesia and is almost exclusively done in the country due to high humidity. This process shortens the overall drying period, and is also known to tame acidity, increase the body in a coffee, and produce rustic, earthy notes. We love that this coffee has flavor characteristics unlike a typical Sumatran wet-hulled coffee. It is lighter-bodied with a sweet earthiness that reminds us of pu-erh tea, but the pomelo-like acidity slowly intensifies and lingers in the finish before you’re left with an aftertaste of galangal–a spicy, citrusy relative of ginger. This complex and sophisticated coffee is a testament to Poda’s hard work, and we’re excited to have it back in our coffee rotation for a second time!
