Flores – Manggarai – Tuang Coffee – Green Unroasted

Taste: Flores coffee typically has a strong flavor and is very fragrant. This particular offering is great on its own or as a blender to bring out those earthy Indonesian notes.  Flores coffee offers low acidity and rich body.

Roast: Medium to Medium/Dark roast  – try for a quicker roast to retain a little more of the crisp semi-sweet tones.

About: Flores is a long, narrow island within the eastern half of the Indonesian chain. Its mountainous landscape is made up of active and inactive volcanoes surrounded by plains of rice fields. Portuguese traders and missionaries were the first Europeans to come to Flores in the early 16th century, naming the island Cabo de Flores, or Cape of Flowers. The Portuguese left their imprint on the people, who came to speak Portuguese and practice Catholicism to this day, but many still hold to traditional animist religions. in 1854, Portugal ceded its historical claims on Flores, and the island became part of the Dutch East Indies territory. The Dutch dispersed coffee throughout Indonesia, discovering where it could grow commercially. Other islands were far more productive, making Flores one of the newest Indonesian origins to export coffee.

The highest peak in Flores is just over 1700 masl, and most coffee production is concentrated in the 1000-1300 masl range by intercropping smallholder producers. Wet-hulled processing, like Sumatra, has been a common practice, but a rising number of cooperatives and producers are applying higher-quality processes to their coffees. Today, Washed Processing is the most common practice by far, but Flores’ specialty coffee is predominantly grown above 1400 meters in the Manggarai region, with varieties like Kartika and Yellow Caturra.

Manggarai is an area of western Flores and islands off the west coast that has been split into three regencies over the past 70 years. The Manggarai people, descendants of the aboriginal peoples of Flores, have settlements covering almost the entire western third of Flores. Tropical farming is a large portion of the area’s economy, including rice, legumes, vegetables, tobacco, corn, and coffee.

Geographically, Manggarai is mountainous, with foggy valleys in between peaks and terraced rice fields throughout. The highest peaks of the highlands are lava domes formed by Ranakah volcano, reaching 2,350masl. Coffee is mostly grown between 1300-1700masl, concentrated in central to eastern Manggarai. The rainy season is from October to February, with the dry season from March through September.

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