We don’t know how you feel about Indonesian coffees but plainly put, we’ve never been great fans of them. Too often they taste a bit like vegetable soup, indeed making them rather unpopular with our tasting team and so far failing to make the final cut for one of our boxes. But if you completely dismiss this huge island nation in Southeast Asia you are at risk of missing out on the few truly excellent coffees that it produces.
During some conversations that we had with potential roasters for our April ’17 box, we spoke with Marco Mehrwald of Man versus Machine in Munich who suggested we give his Indonesia a shot, because as he described it: “It’s one of those coffees that can really change your perception of an origin.”
Sure enough, while discussing the results of our previous blind-tasting session, no one in our team could properly place this coffee, being assigned to countries like Colombia and even Kenya. You should have seen the look on everyone’s face when we revealed where it actually came from.
Toarco is a Indonesian-Japanese joint venture that first introduced the traditional washing process to Sulawesi already back in 1976. Toarco purchases its coffees from various smallholders who produce their crops between 1.200 – 1.800masl and they only accept parchment with a minimum of 40% moisture.
Indeed, farmers who want to sell to Toarco must comply with strict quality measures to ensure their coffees are properly picked, sorted, stored and transported before being sold to Toarco. All coffees are then transferred to Toarco’s own Pedamaran Plantation where they are mechanically dried on traditional Yamamoto driers.
Man versus Machine is working with this coffee for the first time this year and has received rave reviews from its customers, and we are thrilled to finally share our first Indonesian coffee with our customers this month.
Get this coffee together with Java Coffee’s Honduras, El Sauce and Langøra’s, Kochere PB in our upcoming April ’17 coffee box.
Don’t miss out on our upcoming coffee boxes!
Every month, we feature three spectacular coffees from the likes of: La Cabra, Drop Coffee, The Barn, Workshop Coffee, The Coffee Collective, Tim Wendelboe and more.
“An coffee lover’s must-have” – BBC GOOD FOOD
