Indonesian Coffee and the Magic of Mountain Farming
When it comes to Indonesian coffee, typically people think of Sumatra. Truthfully, it really is a big, beautiful island in Indonesia with more than 50 million inhabitants.
And delicious Indonesian coffee has been grown, harvested, roasted and shipped from the world-famous Sumatra region for over a century. In fact, it’s where we get the word ‘java’ from, because Java is one of the islands in the region. And for a time it was considered the best coffee in the world.
Just like our coffee grown in the Tana Toraja region, the coffee is known for being low acid. This is obviously good because the impact on the palate is less about the acid, and more about the actual flavor of the coffee itself, rather than the chemical profile. Low-acid coffee is also good because it’s easier on your stomach, creating much lower potential for acid reflux - while giving you plenty of room to enjoy more coffee without a tummy burn.
But the similarities between the Indonesian coffee that comes from Sumatra, and ours that hails from the mountaintops of Tana Toraja, South Sulawesi, Indonesia, end there.
South Sulawesi is just as it sounds - the southern part of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. In contrast to Sumatra, it is far less populated, way more wild and mountainous, higher in altitude and much more secretive and protected, both in culture and farming practices. But Toraja is even more unique. It’s a remote region, featuring a collection of villages, way up in the mountain jungles. You have to ascend at least 10 hours from Makassar - the local port town, on the way to Toraja, while passing through magical villages like Langda and Rantepao. All the people are friendly, the local cuisine and coffee is amazing and the landscape is absolutely stunning.
But what about the coffee from Toraja? What makes it so special?
Not only is it all wild-grown and hand-farmed premium Indonesian coffee, but the conditions in the air, humidity, soil, rain, temperature, etc all combine to create a coffee-growing environment unique to both Indonesia and especially Toraja.
Up in our mountain jungles, the coffee plants tend to get more light, but are tempered with the shade from the neighboring fruit varieties growing in the same soil. As we’ve mentioned before, our coffee grows alongside banana, cacao, durian, soursop, vanilla, cloves and nutmeg, just to name a few. The high-altitude coffee beans also get more rain, but less humidity and cooler temperatures. But the real difference maker is the air pressure at altitude. Up high in the mountains, the air pressure is lower. This affects plant growth in an interesting way. The plants tend to grow slower at higher altitudes due to this low pressure. Thus the coffee plants spend more time growing their roots at first, before they start fruiting and expanding quickly in size. This creates a sort of “slow cooking” kind of effect. The plants have strong, deep root systems, pulling the nutrients from the soil efficiently, while also collecting flavor hints and clarity from the biodiversity of neighboring fruit trees. Because remember coffee is a fruit, and the beans we drink are the seeds in the fruit, roasted to perfection.
So there’s one of the key secrets as to why Toraja Mountain Coffee is simply the best Indonesian coffee available in the United States today.
The high altitude growing conditions produce a cleaner, healthier plant. Resulting in a unique, delicious, wild-grown, hand-farmed coffee bean, that we then master roast here in Central Florida.
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