Single Origin - Sumatra Gayo
You can clearly experience the rich, rustic, and sweet character typical of Indonesian coffees with this Gayo Highlands wet-hulled lot. The country has ideal altitude, fertile soils, and temperature for growing crops. Given that Indonesia is an archipelago with 17,500 islands, it has a fascinating variety of species and different microclimates.
Smallholders that cultivate this wet-hulled coffee have an average land size of 1 hectare.
The Gayo are the dominant ethnic group in the Gayo Highlands. The highlands are also home to Acehnese, Javanese, and Batak people in addition to the Gayo.
A well-liked destination is the lovely Lake Laut Tawar. The area has mountain peaks all around it and is the only site in the world where the depik fish can be found.
Lamtoro, or river tamarind, trees are widely used in coffee's shade-grown process. Gayo Highlands farmers are renowned for their distinctive pruning technique. They made a 1- to 1.5-meter cut in the trunk. This causes pruned coffee plants to grow more outwardly than upwardly, giving them their distinctive umbrella form.
In Gayo Highlands, almost all farms are modest in size. Farms typically cover 1 hectare. Many smallholder farmers also work as hired labourers at the nearby tea plantations in addition to growing coffee as a cash crop. Another significant crop grown there is tea. Larger tea plantations are frequently found close to coffee estates. Coffee farmers will go there and collect leaves there using hired personnel after the harvest is over.
Farmers on Sumatra are taking more and more steps to group themselves into cooperatives. Farmers used to have little power to improve the prices they received for their cherries or paper. They can pool resources, plan training, and bargain for lower costs when they form cooperatives.
Sumatran coffee is famous for one extremely distinctive characteristic: the wet-hulling procedure, also known as giling basah. Only Indonesia employs this procedure. This is primarily due to the air's high relative humidity, which prevents the beans from drying out completely before being hulled. Farmers process their cherry using the conventional wet hulling (giling basah) method after hand-harvesting it. Cherry is pulped at or close to the farm after harvest using tiny motorised or hand-cranked pulpers. Some farmers in Gayo sell their cherries to a local collector, who then sells the cherries to a processor or wet mill or processes them themselves. The coffee is fermented for roughly 12 hours (in little tanks, buckets, or sacks) and then cleaned the next morning with clean water. Depending on the weather, parchment is sun-dried for anywhere from 30 minutes to two days to allow the skin to dry out, which makes it easier to remove the parchment.
Moisture content ranges from 30 to 40% at this point. To a collector, farmers deliver their parchment. The parchment can either be wet-hulled by the collectors themselves or sold to someone who will. These stages form an integral part of the procedure since, despite being significantly different, a wet hulling machine costs roughly the same as a dry huller. Wet hullers are larger, need more power, and move more quickly than conventional dry hullers. Individual farmers rarely, if ever, possess their own hullers.
The coffee seed is called labu and is pale and malleable after hulling. It is spread out to dry on patios or tarps, where it shrinks and loses moisture to 14–15%. Green coffee at this stage is referred to as asalan and is unsorted and flawed. For asalan, most of the internal commerce is conducted. Exporters will normally complete the drying down to 12-13%, sort, and make preparations for shipment.
