Sumatra Bener Meriah Gayo 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.   

The result of the extra effort is a hugely sweet coffee, thick with fruit flavors but perfectly clean. There are endless tropical and stone fruit flavors to appreciate, along with a buttery, chocolatey creaminess free of any peat or cedarwood grit with which Sumatra’s wet hulled coffee is synonymous.   

A true outlier in every way, and a very successful one at that.  

Sumatra's Aceh Province  

Aceh (pronounced AH-CHEY) is the northernmost province of Sumatra. Its highland territory, surrounding Lake Tawar and the central city of Takengon, is considered to be the epicenter of one of the world’s most unique coffee terroirs.   

Coffee farms in this area are managed with the experience of many generations of cultivation, while also harmoniously woven into their surrounding tropical forests. The canopies are loud and fields are almost impenetrably thick with coffee plants, fruit trees, and vegetables, all of which are constantly flushing with new growth. Year-round mists and rain showers never cease, farm floors are spongy and deep with layered biomass, and almost every square meter of the region seems to exude life. Nothing is ever still. Including coffee ripening, which occurs ten months out of the year.   

Central Sumatera Coffee  

Central Sumatera Coffee (CSC) is a young group, with young leadership. It was originally founded in 2015 by Enzo Sauqi Hutabarat, then a University student with family ties to Bener Meriah. Aware of the growing demand across greater Indonesia for Sumatra’s best coffees, he gravitated toward Aceh as a culture and potential business environment. Until 2020 CSC only sold coffee domestically, but starting in 2021 they began to export as well, selling bits of coffee to the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and finally, in 2024, the United States, via Royal Coffee, for the first time.    

CSC buys coffee from smallholders like a typical processor does. However, CSC also operates 3 large estates of about 500 hectares total: one in Bener Meriah, where this lot was produced; as well as 2 others in North Sumatra province, near Lake Toba. Their farms are organized varietally, allowing them to maintain unique genetic separations during harvest and processing.   

Typical smallholder coffee in Aceh tends to be a blend of cultivars, most of which are catimor hybrids, and this gives much of the area’s coffee a set of common characteristics that can be hard to transcend for a single producer. In CSC’s case, they have the genetic isolation, and the volume from such a large estate, to help them produce something unique.   

Natural Processing  

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.