Alun's Coffee Blog

The endless blue ocean that is the Arafura Sea meets Papua with a violent shudder of breaking surf on rocky beaches. Papua simply rises out of the water like some strange prehistoric animal. Ponderous, enormous, mysterious. The mountains climb endlessly, effortlessly towards the sky. These are some mountains: craggy, monumental- a darker kind of bruised and violent blue. This is a land stuck in time.

I well remember the proverbial first day of the rest of my life. I had arrived in Bali at 10.30pm after leaving Wellington some 23 hours previously and transiting in Sydney. I was on a QANTAS flight packed with an eclectic mix of middle aged holiday makers heading for resorts and surfers heading for sparkling white sand beaches and the perfect wave. The only thing they all seemed to have in common was an unquenchable thirst for booze. When the crew came around with the immigration cards, the guy from Cronulla sitting next to me filled in BALI under “what country are you arriving in” and grabbed another 2 cans of Fosters.

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For most people the geography lesson is not necessary. Java is a name that has been closely associated with coffee ever since the Dutch East Indies Company began growing the trees on the island in the early years of the 17^th Century. The Island, surrounded by the warm waters of the Indian Ocean and the Java Sea, runs roughly due West to East for a little over 2000km. Rich, alluvial plains near the coast are ideal for growing rice, mango, sugar cane and other crops, while the steep volcanic slopes that densely dot the island are where most of the Arabica Coffee is grown. The combination of ideal temperatures, just the right altitudes and humidity and of course the soil types and sunshine hours mean Java has most of the natural attributes to produce quality coffee.

As a new member of the roaste.com site, I am looking forward to sharing my knowledge about Indonesian coffee with all the members here. I have been living here in Indonesia working with farmers throughout Java, Sumatra, Sulawesi, Flores, Bali and Indonesian Papua for 10 years. The coffee from the Islands of Indonesia is truly exceptional and sadly only very recently has word of Indonesian coffee spread out to specialty coffee roasers the world over.