Timor Leste - Organic

This coffee is very unique, yet familiar, with nuanced sweetness and fudge like consistency. We love to find coffees that offer a balance of sweetness and subtle fruity undertones and this Timor Leste fits the bill. It stands apart as not being overly fruit forward and sets itself apart from the fruit dominant trends that sweep the field of specialty coffee; while at the same time still being a part of it. This coffee has a smooth buttery mouth feel with a natural sweetness that is pleasant and welcoming while ever so slightly extending into a fruitiness. We like to think of this coffee as the conforming anti-conformist. Its spectrum of clean and nuanced depth in flavor is something we enjoy and hope you do too! 

It is our first experience working with a harvest from the East Timor region. 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. 

Audience: For those that experiment with aero-press and pour over methods, it appeals to coffee enthusiasts with subtle fruit aftertaste and a pleasant overall sweetness. Enjoy it and make sure it extracts long enough. 

Flavors: Fudge, Grape, Brown Sugar, Caramel, Melon 

Additional Information: Timor-Leste’s coffee industry 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 resembles that of nearby Papua New Guinea and expresses similarly in the cup. 

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 11 select farmers from the Ducurai village, whose farmer community group is called “Sabelo”, a local word for “slaughter farm”, a title retained from generations ago when this area was the center of the local cattle industry. Sabelo was first established in 2010. The Ducurai village is just north of Tatamailau’s peak and Sabelo is one group in a small portfolio we import each year from CBS, who began by training remote smallholders in farm management and processing, and who is now a highly capable exporter with some of the best smallholder traceability in the world.