Day One and Two: The Island of Sumatra

The Island of Sumatra is located in the Republic of Indonesia.

Day One I arrived this morning and was greeted by the in-country Manager for P.T. Indo Cafco (a division of Ecom Coffee Group), Mr. Olivier Tichit. The flight was not too bad - we started in Portland with a 10 hour direct flight to Japan and had a two hour layover. Once I got on the second leg of the trip, it was seven hours to get me into Singapore at about 2 am in the morning. I wandered around the airport until 630 where I began the third leg- a one hour flight to Kuala Lumpur, another area in Malaysia. From there it was a simple flight to Indonesia.

Upon arriving I was taken to the hotel to rest and meet two of the four travelers that made it. One of our group was turned away in Sumatra for having a passport that was to expire in the following month and he had to get on the same plane and go back to the US immediately. Poor guy just learned the worst lesson in life when traveling: always have a passport valid for at least six months after your departure from the area you are going. Otherwise the same thing will happen to you too.

Day Two I boarded a plane in Medan for an hour flight in a single prop plane. Four of us are now traveling together- one other roaster from Canada and Adam Kline from Atlantic specialty coffee, a division of Ecom global.

Flying into the coffee area of Sumatra, known as Lintong, there is a massive lake with huge island in the middle. Flying in I saw how little the wild vegetation is left over. Everywhere you look here the forest has been ripped out and replanted with Palm trees. I can’t even imagine the devastation the local population of animals has gone though. With very little plant diversity in this area, they will need some serious work in education on sustainable initiatives.

We stopped at a parchment hulling area where for the first time I witnessed the Sumatran drying technique. The company is set up to send about two hundred trucks to drive to farms and pick up parchment from farms that own about two acres. The farmers are growing coffee and when ripe they have a small hand pulper (the machine that takes the cherry off) and proceed to dry the parchment to about 40 percent moisture. Then when picked up the delivery man pays them for the coffee and brings it to the mill where the coffee is dried to about 13 % moisture content. What make this different from any other area is the coffee is dried on the sun patio outside of the parchment. The parchment is taken off before the fine drying days. I believe this is how the coffee gets its blue color  as well as its mild acidity. Using this method there is no fermentation time and it is consider a semi-washed coffee. They do this to reduce the coffee's acidity.


After the mill we visited a typical coffee grower in the area. They have one hector or 2.2 acres of coffee. In the picture you will see they have some serious problems with yield and farming practices. There is no real coffee education here so the local farmer only knows what he was told in the past. They are independent but lack an association organizing them to learn more about growing coffee and producing the best beams. In most cases even a good pruning class would help them yield a better coffee. For most farms coffee isn’t their number one crop. They inter-plant others to help subsist there livelyhoods. No one in this area can afford any inputs so they only use the cherry pulp as  fertilizer. The trees are ten different sizes and in no particular order.


Say tune for Day 3 in the coffee area.

Mark