Five Senses Coffee Blog

Cool Cultivars

After 3 years of visiting and getting to know our farmers in Bali we finally have our first shipment on the water heading for Freo. For those who are new to this thread I’ll quickly summarise. We have been visiting the Kintamani region in Bali over the last 3 years in an attempt to influence quality amongst a few farmers that we thought had enough of an interest in working with us to make improvements to their green bean offerings. To make a long story short, we now have farmers that are amongst other things only picking cherries at their optimum level of ripeness, paying closer attention to removing defective cherries before milling, drying all parchment coffee off the ground and keeping all their cultivars separate.

In return, we have bought the farmers a wet mill and are paying them nearly double what they would have received for their parchment this crop.

Keeping the cultivars (USDA, S795 and B1) separate for this crop was done in an attempt to get a better understanding of how each of the cultivars perform in the cup. Gaining knowledge like this is important so that we can start to provide feedback to farmers about consumer preferences and give them the opportunity to make changes to what they grow, harvest and offer to specialty coffee buyers.

We’re pretty excited. We’ll announce when the coffee has arrived and the roasters have had a chance to play and cup. Watch this space.