The region between East Java’s Agropuro and Raung Mountains, the former home to Indonesia’s longest mountain trek, and the latter one of the country’s largest and most active volcanoes, is also layered with coffee production. Communities here grow arabica and robusta varieties as their primary source of income—although, as in much of Java and Sumatra, the fertility of the area allows for much more: families intercrop their coffee with avocado and raise livestock in spacious farms heavily canopied under timber trees like local albizia, erythrina, and mahogany. Coffee here, robusta especially, is picked by hand for ripeness, and harvests at this elevation often last four months or longer. IndokomCitra Persada is Royal Coffee’s oldest sourcing relationship in the region. An independent exporter based in Surabaya, the company manages various estates and represents a number of smallholder groups throughout the island of Java, providing on-farm training in plant management, integrated pest management, harvest quality control, as well as the necessary communications and marketing required to coordinate cherry consolidation and successfully export. The coffee selected from these three communities in the Jember Regency was processed centrally, and is a rare dry-hulled (fully-washed) robusta in a marketplace of natural and wet-hulled counterparts. Fully washed processing includes same-day depulping of cherry and a 12-hour overnight fermentation, a final wash, and sundrying in parchment until fully dried, at which point the coffee can be hulled, sorted and cleaned, and stored for export at Indokom’s warehouse, in Surabaya, where it awaits export.
