My friend Jim is now roasting coffee beans in Longmont. He got some very good beans last fall from Bali and shared the result with me. Here’s how that works.
One the beans are ripe, they are harvested and then dried. The dried cherry is either washed off or taken off through a mill of sorts. What’s left after all that is the green coffee bean. When the cherry is allowed to dry completely on the bean before being removed, it adds some very unusual and earthy qualities to the flavor of the coffee. When the cherry is process off by washing, that’s referred to as “wet processed” coffee. It’s great coffee as well, the taste and properties will be slightly different.
In Indonesia, a lot of the beans are dry processed meaning Sumatra, Sulawesi, Balinese and Timor coffees have a heavy body and earthy flavor. Now, more and more of them are wet processed. Here’s a description from Sweet Marias: http://www.sweetmarias.com/coffee.indonesia.bali.php
Jim got his beans through Sweet Maria’s who got them from Kintamani, Bali. I went there to look around. There are many coffee plantations and tasting areas there. I heard there was only one processing facility that exported their beans but we didn’t have time to go looking for it.
The coffee I had was locally grown and roasted. It’s roasted over a slow fire for one hour. They mix robusta with arabica beans. They also refer to male and female coffee beans. The two beans I’m holding in my hand in one of the photo’s, the completely round bean is the male bean and the one with the flat side is a female. That only holds true for the arabica beans. The robusta are harder to identify because of their size and nature the bean.
At this particular place, I walked through a jungle with robusta and arabica coffee trees, cacao trees, jack fruit trees, a cage with civets that eat the coffee resulting in “cat poop coffee” technically known as Kopi Luwak and a variety of other plants including vanilla. What a rich and abundant area this was!
I got to taste the coffee, ginger coffee, tea and coco as well as smelling freshly harvested cinnamon and vanilla. What a wonderful sensory experience and there are little places like this all over Kintamani. I may go back up there with Dewa to take some photo’s for him. He provides great tours for his guests but doesn’t have any description of the options. I’d like to help him get photo’s of the healing springs, spiritual walk through the rice fields, elephants, rice field views, temples and other things he has to offer his guests. Of course, I’d like to sample some more coffee!
