by Anna Canning, Peace Coffee Production Manager

At 8PM the other night, I found myself dipping a spoon in hot water, preparing to cup some Sumatran coffee. But here in Minneapolis, it was already 9AM the following morning. Jamie and I had been chosen to represent Peace Coffee in a visit to the farmers who grow our Sumatran coffee, the co-op PPKGO, a location Peace Coffee hasn't visited since Melanee went there in 2003. In that time, conflict has waxed and waned in Aceh and a terrible tsunami in December of 2004 put the place on the map in the way that only great destruction and suffering teach geography. It was high time for a visit. Look for Jamie's accounts of the reconstruction following the earthquake and tsunami in a subsequent newsletter. For this article, I'm going to focus on PPKGO, the people, the organization, and the coffee--I hope you have a cup of it at hand. 

Back to the moment where I began--After a day with 11 hours of driving and 4 different flavours of Kerupuks (deep-fried puffs, including buffalo skin, goat skin, shrimp-flavoured something, cassava), I am in a tiny office, the air temp probably 90 degrees and humid outside. Inside, no AC and the roaster's running.

A little tiny sample roaster, and it's 8PM and we're going to do what we've come 8,000 miles to do: taste coffee. My counterpart, Wurdi, ForesTrade’s Medan warehouse manager, is a little man with delicate hands that he flips at the wrists and the punniest sense of humour. Before leaving, I thought plenty on the challenges of actually communicating the subtle points of the flavour and quality of coffee through translation; it turns out that that problem pales by comparison to keeping up with his rapid-fire puns and double-entendres. Mary, another ForesTrade employee, is our intermediary, translating Bahasa Indonesia with a lot of gestures into her Oklahoma twang.

We roast up two samples; a third was waiting when we arrived. The room grows hotter; sweat cannot bead on faces, it forms a gloss across the skin. Wurdi lines up the cups of coffee, three different samples, two cups of each and a cup of water each to rinse the spoon. He does this with samples from each of the lots before they leave this warehouse for the port; projections have them exporting 120-130 containers of coffee this year. That’s a lot of slurping.

The first step is to smell the grounds. Sniffing the first one, I can no longer smell everyone's warmth in the little office--it's spicy, dark, warm, and earthy, there's a pungence to it, musky, Wurdi says "jagged." If the second one were a colour, it would be golden raspberries; there's a fruity syrupiness to it, all the rich fruitiness of Sumatran coffees distilled into a cup, full body, etc. The water comes to a boil, is shut off and forgotten twice as we stumble to describe to each other what we smell.

Finally the water is poured, I break the crust on a few of the cups, belatedly remember that there are other people who may want to play along, share, and then start slurping. Mary's in the middle, translating a funny hodge-podge of words, few of them probably off the Coffee Taster's Flavour Wheel that hangs above us for guidance. Maybe it's merely the euphoria that sets in from slurping coffee after sweating litres and not having had a cup in six days, but, although I lack the vocabulary to understand, the onomatopoeia of what Wurdi is saying describes the coffee beautifully.

In Minneapolis, we will sell both of these samples simply as “Sumatran,” Italian or Full City roasts. But these beans, what are the differences in place, soil, processing, harvest time, anything, that makes it so that one sample is the essence of all that is fruity about Sumatran coffee and the other, the essence of all that is spicy and earthy? I ask for records, data, numbers, locations, villages—information that starts out perhaps scribbled on scraps of paper as the cherries are received and builds a trail down the mountain, eventually forming the backbone of the lot numbers. Those lot numbers are the key to transparency, to organic and fair trade certifications, but they live on the old black Compaq behind us and Lina's gone for the day. It's 8PM and we're leaving for another region in the morning. A hunch, maybe it's worth staying to unravel the mystery--a morning of pouring through Excel files, where somewhere, lot numbers will tie back to tangible proper nouns, villages, processing stations, the requirements of organic certification dictate that they will. But these samples are fresh from the fall harvest. The records have not made it down the mountain yet. I must be patient.

And so perfect specifics and GPS coordinates I have not. Instead I can tell you more stories: how Jamie and I traveled into the Gayo Mountains, mist-draped origin of some of the finest Sumatran coffee. We were picked up at the airport in Banda Aceh and our air-conditioned SUV joined the jostle of aid agency vehicles in the broken streets. Our driver buys petrol out of a plastic jug from a tiny stand tacked onto the front of someone’s house; the proprietor smokes a cigarette as he fills us up. And then we’re off—8 hours through different shades of green to Takengon where we stay the night. 

In the morning, we continue further into the mountains, through tiny village after tiny village, each framed by a gate, the words “Selamat Jalan” [welcome] overhead. The uprights have two dates painted on them, 17.8.45 and 17.8.05, the first the date of Indonesian independence and the second, the date of the most recent peace accord between the Indonesian government and GAM, the Free Aceh movement. PPKGO has members in 31 villages throughout the highlands and as we drive along the road, our convoy pulls over regularly: everyone is eager to show us his plot. Many of the bushes are beautiful old typica plants, 40-50 years old, well-pruned, many still productive. Some Catimor plants were interspersed as an experiment a while back; there’s much joking about whose idea that was—while the plants are more productive, they only remain so for 11 years before they need replaced. Much of the coffee is interspersed with homes, roads and chili plants. To see one field, we walk around between the neighbours’ houses and round the back, others are growing small patches of coffee in their front yards—very different from the coffee cultivation I saw in Chiapas a few years ago where the fields were more remote, in some cases, quite a hike from the farmer's homes. 

Standing in one of these coffee plots, I bend down and scoop up a handful of the orangey-red earth: familiar, the smell of the grounds of Sumatran Full City roast and a little bit of a smell I recognized the other day in a cup of lemongrass-ginger tea. From these small plots, the cherries are taken to village processing plants to be pulped and dried. Our morning follows their course, ending at a larger central processing facility, Trimaju, whose owner hosts us for lunch. Mr. Misradi is quite pleased; many of the photos we brought from Melanee's visit include pictures of his family. We get to meet his aged parents and his small boys, who peep up over the stairs, giggle and duck down every time the strange lady looks at them. After our delicious meal, I step into the kitchen to meet the women who prepared our feast. Chattering and giggling ensues as I repeat terima kasih (thank you) and enak (delicious), the bulk of my meager vocabulary. We can all however agree to “photo.” 

Our time in the Gayo highlands is over too quickly. Soon again we're back on the road, 11 hours to Medan, the port city. There is a shorter route that could get the coffee to port in only 7 or 8 hours, but it's only a gravel path now, badly rutted and dotted with houses abandoned in the conflict. Since the peace agreement, a few people are coming back to these more remote communities, but most buildings remain burned-out shells amongst overgrown coffee plots, long wiry grass taller now than the bushes. Now, as we weave from lane to lane, passing mini-buses, motorcycles, and bikes along the coast road, I talk politics with our host. I ask him what he thinks of the peace accord; if he thinks it will last or be broken like so many others. As we talk, we pass through towns sustained by jobs in liquid natural gas, yet the jobs are meager, the real money siphoned off to Jakarta, leaving the people of Aceh with merely a history of land expropriations and now, as reserves are depleted, plant closings, job losses. This is, in his opinion, the greatest threat to peace--Aceh is another of the areas in the world where a very poor population lives alongside tremendously valuable natural resources. Here, as in so many other places, the wealth of these resources is extracted and exported with the products, leaving only strife, poverty and environmental degradation behind. It's hard to imagine a lasting peace in the face of such inequities.

And thus, in a whirlwind tour, we’ve made the journey that our coffee makes from high in the Gayo Mountains to the port city of Medan. ForesTrade has an office here where the coffee is dry-processed, sorted and bagged up to fill shipping containers. A wipe board on the wall plots when those shipping containers will go to their buyers stateside; my eyes immediately search out Cooperative Coffee’s name. So much of this trip is like that--small administrative thrills interspersed with sensual ones. I returned with a better understanding of the mysteries of Sumatran coffee (moisture content, how it goes up and down a few times before leaving Medan, quality, taste, how exactly that semi-washed processing works) and a handful of pictures and the vivid memories one collects in a strange place, the mind working double time to observe all the new information. 

From Medan, we went on to Samosir Island which juts out into beautiful Lake Toba, to see vanilla production by another group who exports through ForesTrade, then back to Medan and onward again, to the new nation of Timor-Leste. In a later newsletter, I’ll tell about our coffee visits there.

(Back to Headlines)