Lucky bean-seeking team opens Indonesia station and will launch wet plane SOE

Luckin Coffee's team of bean hunters went to the producing area of Gayo on the Indonesian island of Sumatra to look for beans and introduced a wet planed coffee bean into the "SOE Little Black Cup" series, according to relevant media reports.

November coincides with the harvest season of Arabica coffee in Indonesia. Lucky bean hunting team, including Pan Zhimin, champion of the Chinese division of the 2017 World barista Competition and chief coffee master of Ruixing, recently organized a trip to the Lake Tawar producing area of Sumatra Gayo Highlands on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, and selected a local coffee bean treated by wet planing to join the SOE small black cup series and named it "Emerald". A number of new Italian products are scheduled to hit the shelves on the 25th of this month.

It is understood that this Indonesia station is Luckin Coffee's third bean-hunting trip after Ethiopia and Panama in the first half of 2023, and it is also the first station in the coffee-producing region of Asia.

Picture of Lake Tawa from: national Geographic of China

Indonesia is the largest archipelago country in the world. Coffee was introduced to Java by the Dutch colonists as early as the 18th century and spread to other islands as well. Elegant Arabica varieties are concentrated in several islands at higher elevations: northern Sumatra, Sulawesi and Java.

The whole island of Sumatra is divided into eight provinces, of which Arabica coffee is grown on a large scale only in the high-altitude provinces of Aceh and Jiangsu. Locals mainly plant coffee trees around two major volcanic lakes, Lake Tawar and Lake Toba. Among them, the Gayo Mountains in Tawa Lake, which is located in the middle of Aceh province, has ideal conditions for coffee growth.

Sumatra Island belongs to the tropical rain forest region, which is rainy all the year round, and the temperature and humidity in the air are relatively high. Here, coffee is mainly grown on hillsides at an altitude of 1200-1800 meters, and organic models are widely used to grow coffee, coupled with a long history of cultivation, which makes the coffee produced here of higher quality and yield. In addition, the volcano brings fertile soil to Sumatra, where coffee tends to have flavors of spices, chocolates, herbs, wood, and a mellow and smooth taste.

Wet planing (wet hulling) is the most common way to deal with raw beans in Indonesia, which is "forced" due to local weather. The humidity in Indonesia is between 7090% and 90% throughout the year. Typhoons are coming, and the annual rainfall is even above 2000mm. Such bad weather simply cannot be dried in the sun for as long as 2 to 3 weeks as in Africa, and water washing is not only time-consuming, labor costs and water resources are also more expensive, and Indonesia, which aims at mass production, simply cannot afford it. So summed up a unique semi-washing method-wet planing method.

The coffee fruit without peel and pulp is poured directly into the pool to ferment for a few hours, at which time a small amount of pectin remains on the bean shell and the mucous membrane is removed by brushing. Then dry the shell beans, the first drying only needs to reach 30% water content, about 2-3 days, coffee farmers will sell raw beans to the purchaser. The purchaser will shell the semi-dried shell beans directly with the machine to get the innermost raw beans.

Ruixing team described the upcoming Indonesian coffee beans as cherry, sucrose, caramel, cedar and so on.

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