DESOLATE DIVINE, Indonesia

Suitable for all brewing methods.

Roasters Notes: Goji Berry, Plum, Chocolate Orange

Mount Malabar rises over the Java Preanger, the old highland heart of West Java where coffee first took root on the island centuries ago. The trees here sit at 1,800 metres above sea level, worked across steep, forested ridges where volcanic soil and cool mountain air slow the cherry's ripening and concentrate sugar in the seed. It is high ground with deep coffee history, and the farm carries both.

The lot is the work of Poktan Rahayu Tani, a farmer collective that tends the trees and gathers the harvest across these slopes. Theirs is the patient labour of smallholders, picking selectively at full ripeness and pooling cherry from plots scattered across the mountainside. Rather than the wet-hulled giling basah method that gives so much Indonesian coffee its earthy, savoury weight, this lot is processed fully natural, the cherries dried whole and slow so the fruit surrenders its sweetness into the seed. It is a deliberate turn away from the region's convention.

Two varieties stand side by side in the planting: Catimor and Typica, the rugged and the refined. Typica is the ancestral line, the original stock carried into Indonesia in the colonial era, prized for clarity and prone to low yield. Catimor is its modern counterweight, bred for resistance and hardiness on demanding ground. Held together at this altitude and processed this way, the two faces of Indonesian coffee history meet in a single offering, divine and desolate in the same breath.