Flores Coffee: Is potential enough?

Flores is one of the last frontiers of coffee in Indonesia. Getting here is a treat! All you need to do is take a 10 hour flight to Japan, then a 7 hour flight to Singapore with a 5 hour layover, followed by a one-hour flight to Kuala Lumpur. By this time you’ve lost a day and don’t care about how much longer it takes to get where you’re gonig. Once you realize you have a few flights to go you feel better. I won’t bore you with the flight hours anymore (I’ve lost track anyway), so Kuala Lumpur to Medan, Medan to Jakarta, Jakarta to Bali, then the final leg Bali to Flores. The plane actually had cockroaches everywhere. Adam Kline and I were killing them the entire two-hour flight. Don’t ever think coffee travel is easy and glamorous. You have to fight food poisoning, mosquitoes, potential car crashes, and many other very unpleasant activities.

I made it- my final leg of the coffee trip with two days to check out the coffee area. I have never bought Flores coffee and, like Bali coffee, they were unknown to me before this trip. I think we will bring some in for you to try. Coffee travel does come with some perks (pun intended); I saw the most beautiful sunset on the sea of Flores as we drove up the mountain into the coffee area.

The landscape here reminds me of Guatemala, especially the Huehuetenango area. The coffee has decent altitude and there is okay shade. But what reminds me most of that area is the dryness of the climate. For the first time on this trip it was actually cold at night. Flores is in my opinion one of the last frontiers of coffee. It has so much potential but needs unbelievable help. The growers get almost no technical assistance. Their yields are ridiculously low compared to Central America and are told information from their government that doesn’t make any sense. The main grower group we looked at is the at an altitude of about 4500 feet and is called Colol (pronounced Cholol). The woman showing us around is president of the SCAI and is also an exporter. Her name is Heni Sarawati of Lion Lestari, they are a coffee processor and exporter.

I have to point out two highlights from today. The first is something I have never seen before and is probably unique to the area. They have Arabica trees that they say are over one hundred years old that act as shade trees for other younger, higher-producing trees. Both trees produce coffee but the yields on the old trees are tiny. They actually use bamboo poles as platforms to pick the coffee in the large trees.

This picture is of Adam Kline, one of my traveling companions, standing next to a small coffee tree to show the height of the coffee trees above him. Here they do very little if any inter cropping; coffee is most of the time their entire income. The growers group we visited has about 900 hectors of coffee and I estimate about 600 families that have about two hectors each.

The other sight that struck me was how eager everyone was here to meet us. I think we may have been one of the first roasters to visit in a while. We spend a long time with the head of the coffee area today talking about issues affecting the village. Like most coffee areas they also have problems with up and down years in yields. They have so many other problems that it seems pointless to talk about. The family unit is small and works as a unit to produce the coffee. I thought this pulper was a good way to get the cherries off the seeds.

USAid is trying to help with equipment support but I will be giving my two cents to them when I return. These people need fundamental grower support, help from people that know how to grow coffee and maintain a crop. Everywhere you look the trees have Coffee Leaf Rust and I have now idea what this (pictured below) is...I think it is the start of CLR but am not sure. The trees here have very little foliage on them so they are in for a tough year next year.


It seems they don’t prune the trees so the trees get so tall they don’t produce much fruit. With all of that said the people here are eager to do business, and seem to want to produce a good product. We noticed about 5 varieties of coffee; one of them they call the yellow Colombian. The cherries don’t get red they get yellow.

After the trip to the growing area we visited the mill owned by Lion Lestari but sponsored by USAID. The mill is in the process of adding some equipment to help process better coffee. From what I could see the grant from USAID was for a new bucket elevator, density sorter and some kind of screen or size sorter I haven’t seen before. The equipment won’t be installed for this season but most likely for next year. The mill could have used a new huller. They are producing huge amounts of waste from a huller ripping the coffee apart. Because they hull the coffee wet, the beans are weaker and can’t take that much pressure.

After the trip to the mill we visited the office and attempted to do a coffee tasting. We started to do a sample roast with an electric roaster but it took a half hour so we stopped. The roaster needs to be fixed and they need to be shown how to use the roaster to roast lighter. The roasts were way to dark for a good coffee tasting and the grinder was a hand crank. They are eager to learn but without the right tools it is difficult to educate them. All of these issues aside, I can see why USAID is putting money into this Island. It has so much potential, I just wish they had a good plan for technical support. Equipment is great and needed but these farmers are in the stone age for growing coffee.

I hope you enjoyed the blogs on this trip, I look forward to doing the same on the next one. I have much more to discuss when I get back in the office that I hope to share with you later on the blogs. But for now I am off for a few days in the sun in Bali.

Mark