Rare Sumatra honey processed coffee, why is Sumatra coffee mostly wet planed?

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Introduction to the Gayo district of Sumatra

Located in the northernmost part of Sumatra, the Aceh Special Administrative region grows coffee around Lake Lake Tawar on the hillside of Ka Yau and in the small town of Takengon, where coffee is widely grown under shade and without pesticides at all.

Coffee farms and cooperatives are very rare in Sumatra, but they are mainly small farmers with an average planting area of about one to two hectares. Coffee crops are a very important source of income for them. After coffee cherries are processed to the state of shell beans, they can be sold to middlemen in the local market for cash.

In the early years, Aceh's economy stagnated due to tsunami and ethnic conflict, which is not as well-known as the Lindong producing area of Lake Toba, but in recent years, Aceh's coffee is no longer as difficult as it used to be.

The wet peeling method in Aceh is slightly different from that in the Lindong producing area, where the farmers remove the peel of the coffee and directly place it in the sink to soak and wash, while the Lindong producing area will leave it until the next day and then wash it with clean water. therefore, the coffee beans in Lindong will remain a little pectin, and the drying time is longer than that in Aceh, and the slight differences in treatment create different flavor characteristics of the producing areas.

The reason why Sumatran coffee is mostly wet planed:

First of all, because of the climate of Sumatra and the high humidity here, it is necessary to adopt the method of short drying time. In fact, the bigger reason is that most of the raw beans in this producing area are purchased from different small farmers. That is to say, the small farmers in the middle turn coffee cherries into shelled raw beans and sell them to buyers on the first floor. The purchasers will then resell these raw beans to distributors, who will turn them into dried raw coffee beans and then sell them to traders. Why does such a trading process lead to the birth of wet stripping? Mainly because the small farmers want to cash out soon.

At present, there is no independent processing plant in Sumatra to buy coffee cherries directly, so small farmers have no choice but to use their own buckets as traditional washing fermentation tanks, and then immediately throw the coffee beans into the fruit shell machine (but because the raw beans are still soft, they will be squeezed by the machine, so they will show a sheepfoot shape). Remove the pulp and shell of the beans, and the moisture is about 30anth40%, or higher. This is very different from traditional washing or tanning, because it is usually not treated until the moisture level is only about 13%. If you wait for the real drying before giving it to the acquirer, the time to realize cash will be lengthened (because the sun usually takes 27 Murray 30 days). Therefore, it is only after going to the traders that the sun or machine drying is carried out to reduce the moisture of raw beans to 13%. After that, the beans are screened and hand-selected, and the beans are sold in different grades according to the defect rate and the size of the beans, and the beans are kept clean for 90 days. so that the beans can have a good "rest and recuperation", so that the moisture of the beans can be consistent (this is called the activity balance of water).

The whole process is handled by different people at different stages, and the condition and quality are very difficult to control. In addition, the washing and fermentation of small farmers, in fact, there is no real fermentation, but only to wash and buoyancy to remove too bad beans, and does not have the role of traditional washing fermentation tank, so the flavor is more impetuous, the strain is difficult to control, and the taste is not so clean. In terms of sun exposure, unlike the traditional sun-drying method, the pulp is used as the basis for fermentation, which can produce fruity coffee beans. Therefore, Sumatra wet stripping method, in the global competition of high-quality beans, the flavor can only be "special" to compete, the long-term development is not very optimistic.