Pangalengan, located in Bandung Regency, West Java, is a fairly high plain with much cooler temperatures than the coastal area of Jakarta, Indonesia's capital. As such this area has always been a get-away destination of sorts for those looking to escape the heat of one of the largest metropolises in the world for the weekend. This area turned out to be a center for plantations and producers of quality arabica
coffee.
Long overshadowed by the island to the north, Sumatra, which produces the vast majority of Indonesia's coffee crop, West Java, and Pangalengan in particular, have only recently begun to come into their own as a single origin for coffee. As recently as 2015 West Java coffee could only be marketed by being shipped to the main coffee port of Medan and blended with Sumatra coffee to be sold to the biggest coffee importers each requesting 15-30 containers in a single harvest season. It is a pity because the world was missing out this entire time. We decided that if we were going to do wet hulled we should do it right. So here it is a single origin, high quality wet hulled coffee.
This lot of coffee was sourced as asalan, the name given to wet hulled coffee after it has been dried 4-7 days after hulling at around 30% moisture. The asalan is sold at anywhere from 13-15% moisture for further processing by an exporter. We noted citrus and herbs in this lot and saved it from a ignoble end as a commodity blender. Agus Gunawan and Insan Sani both run Sunda Kopi who are the collectors of this lot. With a growing area of over 500 hectares dedicated to arabica cultivation with a potential production of 200 MT per year Sunda Kopi are respected collectors and wet processors. Smallholder farmers, who may own as little as 10-15 trees to several hectares under cultivation, usually sell their fresh cherries throughout the harvest season to producers like Sunda Kopi who then process the coffee down to asalan, parchment or dried natural pods. Located right in the middle of a huge government owned tea plantation, Sunda Kopi and their farmer neighbors are carving a great name for themselves. This is our second year milling their coffee.
For the 2022 season we upped the quantity of this coffee we produced even though the prices in Indonesia started to climb. fortunately we were able to source this lot while still moderately economical. Who knows what prices will hold in the future but as of the end of the season it would cost 15% more for this coffee than when we contracted it at the beginning of the harvest.
