There is precious little microlot coffee from Timor-Leste, a small island country in the far east of Indonesia’s archipelago. Café Brisa Serena manages to export a small collection of community lots each year. These coffees, small in volume as they are, represent some important contrasts in specialty: vintage techniques and genetics managed with modern quality control systems, and isolated island villagers accessing a sophisticated global market.
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 to the Timorese, 25% of whom rely on coffee production for their livelihood. 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 endemic typica variety coffees, whose purity and diversity resemble that of nearby Papua New Guinea, and are expressed similarly in the cup.
This coffee is produced by 29 select farmers from the Ducurai village, part of the “Eratoi” group, whose name translates to “water spring”, after the source of a nearby waterfall. The Ducurai village is just north of Tatamailau’s peak. Coffee in the Letefoho sub-district is not young. Trees are tended to 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.
Fermentation takes place in small buckets or bags, which are filled with fresh water and put in a shady area to ferment for 2 full days. Coffee is dried on raised beds or tarpaulins and constantly sorted for quality.
