Coffee beans introduce Mount Merapi to create high-quality coffee

Growing in the fertile volcanic soil of Mount Merapi in Yogyakarta, Merapirobusta Coffee has a unique and weakly acidic taste.

Compared with several other Robusta, this taste is particularly mellow, so it is more high-end and is suitable for making espresso.

Merapirobusta coffee does not use pesticides or any chemical fertilizers during its growth, because the volcanic soil itself provides enough fertilizer for coffee trees.

The less well-known coffee variety was tasted by the Jakarta Post Travel Section during the Carnival Robusta Coffee season (Ecstatic Robusta Session) in Warung Kopi Sruput Kemang, Jakarta, last month.

The conference is part of the Indonesian Coffee Project campaign, launched by Lisa Virgiano, a passionate gourmet who studied for a master's degree from Malmo University in Sweden. The master's thesis is about the development of East Java coffee in Bentovorso.

Lisa also invited Sumijo, a Merapi coffee grower, to share his inspiring and heartbreaking story.

Sumijo said that after the last massive eruption of Mount Merapi in 2010, scattered magma and soaring heat reduced the area of coffee plantations from 700ha to 100ha.

All the coffee beans stored for roasting were destroyed, leaving only 30 per cent of robusta beans and 10 per cent of Arabica beans.

Years after the disaster, new coffee seeds have re-grown in Mount Merapi soil, but yields are still low.

Sumijo and other Merapi coffee growers have neither the knowledge nor modern machinery to improve the quality of coffee beans through better hand selection, wet technology and more advanced storage systems, so it is still difficult to recover from the disaster of volcanic eruptions.

Fortunately, he was introduced to Warung Kopi Sruput's boss, also a famous chef, Ragil Imam Wibowo, whose newly built restaurant was looking for high-quality green coffee beans.

If you have a chance to go to Yogyakarta, you can also see Sumijo's small coffee shop, named Warung Kopi Merapi, which is located on Kaliurang Street, which is kilometers away from Sleman19.9.

In this small shop, tourists can taste a delicious cup of Merapi coffee. Mount Merapi is in sight outside the window. The coffee shop, built from the ruins of the 2010 volcanic eruption, is unique and built to commemorate this terrible tragedy.

According to Lisa, premium robusta coffee (with the exception of chivet) sells for 300000 rupiah (US $26) to 400000 rupiah per kilogram.

By rough calculation, a cup of coffee costs only 10 grams of beans, and the actual price of such a cup of coffee ranges from 3000 rupiah to 4000 rupiah, which is much cheaper than in large coffee shops.