Indonesian Coffee introduces the country's brief History

A brief History of Coffee

In 1696, the then Governor of the Netherlands in Malabar, India, gave a batch of coffee seedlings to the Governor of the Netherlands in batavia in Batavia (present-day Jarkata in Jakarta). This was the first time that coffee was grown in Indonesia. However, the first batch of coffee seedlings were washed away by the flood. In 1699, Batavia accepted the gift again. This time, the coffee seedlings survived successfully and ushered in the first harvest in 1701, which began the coffee trip to Indonesia.

At first, coffee was grown in and around Jakarta, and then gradually expanded to central and eastern Java, as well as Sulawesi, Sumatra and Bali. At the same time, in eastern Indonesia, coffee was also grown in Flores on the island of Flores and Timor on the island of Timor in the Portuguese territory at that time, but the source of the coffee seedlings was different.

Indonesian coffee began to supply the European market in 1711, when Indonesia was the first country outside Africa and Arabia to grow coffee on a large scale. It became the world's largest exporter of coffee in the 1880s. The fame of Java coffee began here.

The prosperity of coffee in Indonesia was not sustainable, coffee production was fatally hit at the end of the 18th century, and leaf rust, originally found in West Java, spread rapidly, destroying the Arabica coffee estate in Indonesia. The leading position of the coffee trade was replaced by the American producing countries. However, it is worth mentioning that the leaf rust disaster did not affect the eastern Indonesian producing areas, namely Flores Island and Timor, where the genes of some coffee trees in Timor today can be traced back to the 16th and 17th centuries.

According to ICO, Indonesia ranked third in coffee production in the world in 2013, although 80% of it was Robusta.

Country profile

Indonesia, the "country of the Thousand Islands", has the largest number of islands in the world.

When it comes to Indonesia, the most familiar one is probably the resort island of Bali