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TREE TO CUP: The Sensuous Sumatra for Serious Sipping
May 15, 2008
 Among the archipelago of islands known as Indonesia is Sumatra which has produced coffee since the Dutch colonizers landed there in the 1600s in ships owned by their East India Trading Company partners. The first plantings were in Aceh near Lau Tawar Lake, the landlocked as part of the Bukit Barisan Mountains known as the Parade of Mountains. Its long coffee harvest (eight months), rich organically nurtured volcanic soil, and right-for-coffee weather produces an arabica coffee with a heady fragrance and rich, full-bodied taste in the cup with low acid smooth highlights.
Most of Sumatra's small coffee farmers practice organic farming techniques like intercropping to introduce other cash crops like mango, avocado, guava, banana and papaya in the shade-grown areas and most, if not all of the coffee is grown without chemicals even if the crop is not yet certified as organic.
The small Lintong plots of coffee are scattered over a high, plateau of fern-covered clay, grown without shade. The arabicas from the Sumatra Gayo Mountain in Aceh, the province at the northernmost tip of Sumatra, are shade grown in the mountain basin surrounding Lake Tawar and the town of Takengonin are meticulously processed and have a subtly sweet, round lighter body than the flavor profile of the typical Mandheling/Lintong varieties.
Indonesian coffees are processed in several ways: dry, semi-washed and, less frequently, fully washed. The dry processed wild coffees often have more character. Classifying coffees by region is not, however, typical for the Sumatran coffee industry which, instead picking, preparation and processing determines the "character" of the cup. One of Sumatra's prize coffees is Mandheling (traditionally spelled Mandailing) is technically the name of an ethnic group of the island, not a region. On the island, Mandheling refers both to Lintong coffees and to coffees grown under similar conditions in Diari, north of Lake Toba. Some 40 million people of more than a dozen ethnic groups live in an area the size of Spain and speak 25 languages with hundreds of dialects. Among the groups are the Gayo, the Minangkabau, the Batak, and the Malays who are the largest group.
For coffee lover tourists, the beauty of the coffee farms is but one reason to visit, the others are the opportunity to see the tapir, two-horned rhino, black gibbon and, perhaps, the Sumatran tiger which has been declared an endangered species. The fifth largest island in the world (but the third largest in the archipelago) Sumatra has lush rainforests, active volcanoes, Amazonian rivers, exotic for and fauna and 582 species of birds.
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