SUMATRA HIGH ALTITUDE SLOW DRY NATURAL

This is a coffee from Aceh Province, Sumatra’s most famous and prolific specialty wet-hulled producing area. Naturals are next to impossible to do successfully in Aceh, where the swirling, rich humidity is a defining feature of the mountainsides. (The climate is why the wet-hulled process, which is basically a drying shortcut, is the norm to begin with.) Very limited quantities can be made, however, in exactly the right microclimate.   

Most of Aceh’s coffee is grown by hundreds of smaller farmers and gradually consolidated through processing and milling. Central Sumatera Coffee, on the other hand, worked directly with just one small producer group to source this coffee in cherry state, bringing it down from the furthest reaches of Burni Telong mountain, just West of Bener Meriah, to dry at their own patios in Bener Kelipah. The cherry for this tiny lot was picked at 1800 meters, a truly astonishing elevation for an area where most coffee is picked much lower, typically between 1200-1400 meters.   

CSC manages processing on their own estates. The Bener Meriah estate employs 30 pickers during harvest months, and 6 specialists for processing. Cherry is picked daily and sorted for ripeness and uniformity before being sent to processing. Smallholder microlots are also processed on the CSC farm properties, where the CSC team can oversee all the details.  

Cherry drying for this microlot took place on patios at CSC’s various processing facilities around Bener Kelipah. From the cherry stage, this coffee is first dried in a thin layer, then in successively thicker pilings with more agitation as the coffee dries. Warmer, dryer temperatures at this lower elevation helped the cherries avoid spoilage as they dried for 27 full days—more than 6 times longer than the average wet hulled coffee—and finally reached the desired 11-12% moisture. After drying, the coffee was hulled of its cherry pods, mechanically milled, hand sorted, and bagged for export. 

From the cherry selection to the meticulous drying, this coffee was produced with intentionality in mind. The effort put into this lot pays off in the cup with complex notes of apricot, dried fig, and dark chocolate.