Timor Leste Organic Washed Dark Roast

ORGANIC TIMOR LESTE

$18.00

Try our local small batch dark roast organic timor-leste!

Region: Ducurai Village
Process:  washed
Roast: dark
Flavor Notes: cocoa, caramel, vanilla

Our Organic Timor-Leste dark roast delivers a rich, smooth cup with deep notes of cocoa, caramel and vanilla. Carefully roasted to bring out its bold character without bitterness, this coffee offers a velvety finish and comforting sweetness in every sip. Perfect for those who love a full-bodied dark roast with balanced flavor and a smooth finish.

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Timor-Leste, or East Timor, takes up the eastern half of the greater Timor island, part of the  Indonesian archipelago and not far from the northern coast of Australia. It is a young republic with a long and chaotic political history, having only achieved full independence in 2002, after almost 500 years of consecutive occupations by the Portuguese, the Dutch, and Indonesia. 

Timor-Leste’s coffee is small in overall scale but highly significant to the Timorese, 25% of whom rely on coffee production for their livelihood. The island’s inland forests also happen to be historically significant, being the origin of coffee’s most adaptive genetic cross—the Timor Hybrid—a natural breeding of local robusta and typica trees that was identified in the 1920s, and whose vigorous genetics can be found in countless timor-based cultivars in almost every producing country today. The island’s isolation has also allowed for a unique preservation of endemic typica variety coffees, whose purity and diversity resembles that of nearby Papua New Guinea, and expresses similarly in the cup. 

The greater Timor island is sun-baked and humid along its coast, but the interior quickly rises to lush and rugged highlands, with sharp ridges and vibrant grass-covered slopes. The Ermera municipality is one of the island’s highest in elevation and includes its highest peak, Tatamailau. The villages in the mountain’s vicinity are where Café Brisa Serena (CBS), a social enterprise and exporter, has spent the last 10 years developing smallholder coffee value chains.

This coffee is produced by 10 select farmers from the Ducurai village, whose group is called “Lebudu Kraik”, which translates to “lower wetlands” and comes from their particular location on the mountainside. The Ducurai village is just north of Tatamailau’s peak and Lebudu Kraik is one group in a small portfolio we import each year from CBS, who began by training remote smallholders in farm management and processing, and who is now a highly capable exporter with some of the best smallholder traceability in the world.

Coffee in Letefoho is not young. Trees are tended to for decades, and due to the lofty, vine-like typica varieties throughout, coffee is often harvested by leaning long wooden ramps against the trunk so that pickers can access the sprawling canopy. Farms range between 0.5 and 1.5 hectares only and tend to be well-shaded by evergreen she-oaks, a natural mulcher and nitrogen fixer. During harvest coffee is picked painstakingly by hand and processed at home on personal or shared pulping equipment, which is often hand-made using wood and textured metal discs. 

After fermenting in small personal containers, the coffee is dried on raised beds and constantly sorted for quality. Many of the current harvesting and processing standards come directly from CBS, who has helped establish specialty protocols and invested in improvements to processing equipment. The addition of drying structures, for example, has greatly improved farmers’ ability to consistently meet quality standards for moisture content and water activity. In addition to coffee, Ducurai farmers also manage personal crops of taro and cassava, as well as pigs, goats, fowl, and cows, and many also have personal compost programs in addition to being organic certified.

 

Additional information

Weight 12.00 oz
Texture

Ground, Whole Bean

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