Casa Espresso: Java, Tenjolayare, Natural

Our very first coffee from Java, and what a beautiful coffee it is! We sourced this coffee from Olam Specialty Coffee, in 2011 they joined with Paguyuban Sunda Hejo Klasik Beans to further develop high quality coffee cultivation in West Java. The focus of the two organisations was to produce high quality coffee through sustainable means, making it a natural fit for partner with them to source the high-quality coffee and introduce West Java Program in Indonesia. Red ripe cherries are hand selected and then floated in a water tank to further select the highest quality cherries by density.

The cherries are then dried in the sun on raised beds for an average of 25 days.

“Java” has become synonymous with coffee. The link between Java and coffee goes back to the late 1600s when the Dutch introduced coffee to the island of Java, making it the first place outside of Ethiopia and Arabia where coffee was cultivated.

Records show that the first coffee seeds were planted by the Dutch Governor in Batavia (now Jakarta) in 1696, but they failed to grow because of flooding. The second sowing in 1699 did much better and the exports began within a few years. By the 1720s, the Dutch trading company VOC was exporting about 60 tons of Java coffee per year to Europe. The coffee industry grew exponentially but disaster struck in the late 1800s when leaf rust disease decimated the crops. Over a twenty-year period, most of Java’s Arabica plantations were wiped out, with some being replaced by Robusta. It looked as if the Javanese Arabica would be lost to the world. But some Arabica survived, growing in the highlands. It’s seen a resurgence in recent years thanks to extensive public and private involvement.