Wet hulled coffee from the team at Rantekarua Estate is always a notch or two above the traditional wet hull grades commonly found in Sumatra. Unlike its organic certified counterpart which comes from the estate itself, this lot was grown, harvested, and processed by smallholder farmers working in the vicinity of Rantekarua Estate. PT Sulotco, the owners of Rantekarua Estate, train and support the smallholders who then sell their parchment coffee to Solutco for wet hulling, final drying, and final sorting.
Colonial Origins
Indonesia has one of the oldest modern cultivation histories of coffee on the planet. Dutch colonialists brought coffee directly from Yemen in the 1600s, gradually spreading coffee through smallholder planting programs, and eventually vast estates for coffee’s production (interestingly, mostly fully washed at the time, one of the world’s earliest supplies of this type of process). Dutch presence was mostly on Indonesia’s largest islands of Java, Sumatra, and Sulawesi.
The Rantekarua Estate is located in the Bittuang district of Tana Toraja Regency, South Sulawesi province on the island of Sulawesi. Originally founded by Dutch settler H.J. Stock van Dykk, it persisted under Dutch colonial management until Indonesia’s national revolution in the 1940s, during which it was abandoned. The young sovereign Indonesian government gave cultivation rights to PT Sulotco Jaya Abadi in 1987, and the estate is still managed by the same group.
Since the late 80’s the 1200 hectare estate has undergone substantial renovation and become a beacon of innovation particularly in matters of land conservation. More than 200 hectares have been converted into natural forest and coffee cultivation is managed with organic inputs.
The estate also works with a local network of smallholder farmers in Toraja, from throughout the northern and eastern areas around their processing site. Farmers grow, pick, and process their coffee to semi-dry parchment, at which point PT Sulotco buys it and centrally manages the final wet hulling, drying, and hand-sorting for export.
Smallholder Processing Near Rantekarua
Smallholder processing in the Toraja area closely resembles that of traditional northern Sumatra: coffee is hand-picked and depulped in small quantities, commonly on shared pulping equipment. Parchment is then fermented overnight, washed clean with groundwater, and sun-dried rapidly on tarps until it is dry enough to transport. At this stage the parchment is sold to PT Sulotco and consolidated for wet-hulling, and then the final drying stage on raised beds until the internal moisture is 11-12%, at which point they are hand-sorted for physical imperfections and moved to indoor storage.
This wet-hulling process, called Giling Basah in the Indonesian language, first became popular in the 1980s, mainly as a way for Indonesian coffee processors in constantly humid, drizzly areas like northern Sumatra to hasten their drying as much as possible. The by-products of such a technique in these particular areas are the uniquely full mouthfeel and forest-like complexity that are now widely associated with all of Indonesia’s coffee. While much of the country’s coffee is in fact fully “washed” (in this case, fully dried in parchment like in Latin America), the wet-hull process is a regional signature that makes much of Indonesia’s coffee indispensable for roasters and blenders.
