Sumatra Boru Batak

These beans come from the Lintong region, grown by small farmers with an exceptional history of producing great coffee near Lake Toba.  If you've had the La Minita Sumatra Iskandar before, then you will be familiar with this coffee, but this is what they are calling it now.  Compared to what you expect to find out of Indonesia, this Sumatra is extraordinary.  These beans are meticulously sorted with only the largest and cleanest beans making the cut (screen 17/18+). Most Sumatran coffee is riddled with broken beans, bug marks, chaff, and a variety of bean sizes, but that is not the case here.  Notice the beautiful blue hue of the coffee - they are almost glowing.  Everything about the growing and processing and sorting of this coffee is meticulous, and the labor involved in producing this coffee is mind-boggling.  The cultivars are Ateng, Jember, and Garundang.

Boru Batak is extremely rare, only a few hundred bags a year at most, and it has to be reserved long before it arrives.

A wide variety of roasts are acceptable for this coffee, but I do have to most recommend it as a light to medium roast.  At a city roast (maybe 30-45 seconds past the end of the 1st cracks), you find the most complexity, which includes grapefruit, sweet tobacco, butterscotch, and herbal notes.  It has wonderful acidity and a dryness.  At Full City, or even a few snaps into the 2nd cracks, it really pulls out the cedar, both in aroma and taste, but it loses the acidity and fruit of the lighter roasts.  The balance of citrus with cedar in the light roasts, plus thick creamy body and clean aftertaste, is what I feel makes it so remarkable.  There are no musty, earthy, or smoky notes in this Sumatran bean.

It's a big, dense bean and you can take it well into the 2nd cracks if you must.  At 40 seconds into the 2nd cracks you have a thick syrupy bodied dark roast that doesn't taste burnt and has some nice foresty spicy notes in the background. It's an expensive bean to roast dark, but nonetheless is a fantastic dark roast coffee.

Our whole staff is hooked on it.  This is the sort of memorable mug of coffee that you're still thinking about the next day.  It's pricey, but in this case, I would argue that you get what you're paying for. 

This crop arrived in the US in April 2020.