The Coffee Highlands

Coffee came to the archipelago with the Dutch East India Company (VOC), which brought arabica planting to Java at the turn of the eighteenth century, and the island's plantations made the word Java a name for coffee itself. From Java the crop spread along the volcanic spine of the islands, into the highlands of Sumatra, Bali, Sulawesi and Flores, where altitude, cool nights and young volcanic soil suit the tree. The coffee of these uplands is a product of colonial history and of the smallholders who have grown it since.

The highlands are the same ranges that carry the archipelago's rice terraces and spice gardens, and the coffee tree belongs to their mixed farming. Arabica, Coffea arabica, is grown on the cool slopes, and on the hotter lowlands the hardier robusta, Coffea canephora, takes its place. Many of the growers are smallholders who tend a few rows alongside clove, vegetables and food crops, and who sell the cherry or the dried bean to a collector. Indonesia has given several of its coffees the protection of a Geographical Indication, a legal tie between a name and a place. Among them are Kopi Arabika Gayo, from the highlands of Aceh in northern Sumatra, Kopi Kintamani Bali, from the volcanic slopes above Lake Batur, Kopi Arabika Toraja, from the highlands of South Sulawesi, Kopi Arabika Java Preanger, from the mountains of West Java, and Kopi Arabika Flores Bajawa, from the uplands of central Flores. Each name binds the coffee to a district, so that the cup stands for the land that produced it. Kintamani is the Balinese case. There the coffee is commonly grown among citrus trees in the cool air of the caldera rim, and it belongs to the same farming landscape as the island's terraces and its temple-governed water. Toraja and Gayo likewise sit in uplands where the coffee is part of the village economy, not a separate estate enterprise. In the processing of the bean the archipelago has its own customs. Sumatran growers have long used a wet-hulling method, in which the parchment is removed while the bean is still moist. Other districts wash or dry their coffee in the more familiar ways, and the differences of method are part of what separates one highland cup from another.

In the highlands and across Java, coffee is commonly drunk as kopi tubruk, ground fine and stirred with hot water and sugar in a glass, the grounds left to settle at the bottom. It is taken in the warung and at home, often with fried snacks, steamed cakes or sticky rice sweets. Each highland cup carries its own character, but the table custom is shared: a hot, sweet, unhurried glass.