Timor-Leste, or East Timor, takes up the eastern half of the greater Timor island, part of the Indonesian archipelago, and not far from the northern coast of Australia. Timor-Leste’s coffee is small in overall scale but highly significant. The island’s inland forests also happen to be historically significant, being the origin of coffee’s most adaptive genetic cross—the Timor Hybrid—a natural breeding of local robusta and typica trees that was identified in the 1920s, and whose vigorous genetics can be found in countless Timor-based cultivars in almost every producing country today. The island’s isolation has also allowed for a unique preservation of the endemic Typica coffee variety. The greater Timor island is sun-baked and humid along its coast, but the interior quickly rises to lush and rugged highlands, with sharp ridges and vibrant grass-covered slopes. The Ermera municipality is one of the island’s highest in elevation and includes its highest peak, Tatamailau. The villages in the mountain’s vicinity are where Café Brisa Serena (CBS), a social enterprise and exporter, has spent the last 10 years developing smallholder coffee value chains. This coffee is produced by 14 select farmers from the Ducurai village. Ducurai is just north of Tatamailau’s peak. It is one coffee in a small portfolio we import each year from CBS, which began by training remote smallholders in farm management and processing, and is now a highly capable exporter with some of the best smallholder traceability in the world. Coffee here is not young. Trees are tended for decades, and due to the lofty, vine-like typica varieties throughout, coffee is often harvested by leaning long wooden ramps against the trunk so that pickers can access the sprawling canopy. Farms range between 0.5 and 1.5 hectares only and tend to be well-shaded by evergreen she-oaks, a natural mulcher and nitrogen fixer. During harvest, coffee is picked painstakingly by hand and processed at home on personal or shared pulping equipment, which is often hand-made using wood and textured metal discs. After fermenting in small personal containers, the coffee is dried on raised beds and constantly sorted for quality. Many of the current harvesting and processing standards come directly from CBS, which has helped establish specialty protocols and invested in improvements to processing equipment. The addition of drying structures, for example, has greatly improved farmers’ ability to consistently meet quality standards for moisture content and water activity. In addition to coffee, many Ducurai farmers also manage personal compost programs in addition to being organic certified. We look forward to sharing this month’s Roaster’s Choice offering with you!
