Sulawesi G1 Wet Hulled - Mamasa Valley (Aged 36 Months) Sulawesi is an island located in Indonesia.
This coffee is roasted to a delightfully dark bean. The tones pulling out of this harvest are of leather, pipe tobacco and a little bit of a prune like sweetness. This leaves us with a bold and rustic cup of coffee. Sulawesi coffees deliver the good body and herbal notes expected from Indonesian coffee, but also some unexpected brightness and fruit in the tail end of the sip.
Coffee was first planted successfully on Java around 1700, cultivation spread slowly to what would become Indonesia, and did not arrive on Sulawesi, until 1750, after the coffee of Java had performed its role as progenitor to the coffees of Central America and began its ascent to being considered, alongside Arabian Mocha, as one of the best coffees in the world. It should be noted that nearly all coffee from any island in Indonesia was considered “Java” until the early 20th century, Sulawesi has no real history on the consumption side of coffee prior to that time.
This bean comes to us as one of the darkest raw beans I have seen. The bean is almost a brownish color already. It was the Dutch government that introduced the process of aging coffee from the East Indies for 2-3 years and the “brownish” beans came to be known by consumers with high quality and a “mellow” cup. Aged coffee became so popular that when disease decreased supply from Java and Sumatra to the point that producers could not afford to sit on coffee for aging, they began to “sweat” coffee during its 4-5-month voyage, much of it through the tropics, as an alternative to aging. The coffee would be sealed in the hold of cargo ships to sweat during the voyage, then making it arrive brown. The darker brown the coffee, the higher the price paid, as the better the coffee was said to be.
