Sumatra Koperasi Buana Mandiri
https://www.danelaw.coffee/shop/p/sumatra-buana-mandiri
Located in the Bener Mariah Regency of Aceh province, Northern Sumatra, Buana Mandiri co-operative (Koperasi) has more than 2000 members and produces characteristic wet-hulled coffees. Wet-hulling is a process which is most commonly associated with Sumatra, but is also seen in other Indonesian origins as well as other Asian coffee producing nations. It ‘s a totally unique style of processing, and helps give Sumatran coffees some of their distinctive characteristics.
With wet-hulled coffees (or Giling Basah to use the local term for it) the cherries are picked and pulped, often using small home-made pulping machines. Next the pulped cherries ferment in their own mucilage for around a day, before being washed clean, then dried to around 35% moisture. After this, the beans are then hulled to remove the parchment layer (usually done at around 12% moisture in other processes, immediately before export) and further dried to export levels. This leaves the beans looking blueish in colour and gives them highly desirable and distinctive characteristics. Lower (and often more complex) acidity than washed coffees, full body and unique herbal aromatics like sandalwood, leather, tobacco leaf and cedar. At their best, Sumatran coffees are some of my absolute favourites in the world.
It’s because of these characteristics that Sumatran coffees are so sought-after, particularly as espresso blend components, where they provide a great deal of structure and depth, but also as single origin coffees, where their profile really is unique.
This coffee is a co-operative lot, meaning that the harvests of many different producers has been bulked, sorted and organised to create an exportable coffee that individual farmers would struggle to achieve alone. This coffee would have been grown at around 1350 metres above sea level, and is composed of Typica, Gayo 1 and Catimor varietals, all of which are pretty common for the local area.
I tasted a lot of samples of Sumatran coffees before I found one that I was truly impressed by. This coffee has that beautiful complexity of acidity that reminds me of tropical fruit, like passionfruit and papaya. It also has that captivating herbal lemongrass, tobacco leaf and cedar characteristic that is so difficult to find. Although this isn’t the most obvious coffee in the range, I’m sure that you’ll enjoy it every bit as much as I do.