Wahyu and Kojoyo Cooperative – Indonesia Double Ferment – Calm version
Indonesia Double Ferment by Wahyu and the Kojoyo Cooperative – Reading Version.
In Central Java is where coffee in Indonesia grows and flourishes and it’s also where the coffee you are currently drinking comes from!
Welcome to Experience Coffee’s written version of the story behind Wahyu’s double-fermented Indonesian Arabica coffee of the varietals Lini S, Kartika, and Sigararutang. Don’t worry, we will cover what all of this means!
I will guide you through the coffee you have purchased and are probably drinking right now. We will touch on several topics:
- Who is Wahyu, and what is the Kojoyo Cooperative?
- Why is this coffee special, and what does double fermentation mean?
- How was this coffee roasted?
- A full price breakdown of this coffee — nothing is hidden. What do I pay, and what does the farmer receive?
- One fun brew recommendation.
If you read the starting page, you probably have a cup of coffee in your hand. Maybe put on some music, enjoy the trip into Indonesia, and welcome to Experience Coffee.
Oh, and to answer the question marks around the varietals Lini S, Kartika, and Sigararutang, these orange quote fields throughout the text will give you key explanations as you read. Remember them!
What is a varietal?
Coffee species include the well-known Arabica and the less-known Robusta plants. Sub-types of these species are called varietals. Some of the most famous ones are Red Bourbon or the very expensive Geisha variety.The varietals in this coffee are less known because they originate primarily from Indonesia. That means that in your cup, you actually have three different types of coffee beans working together.
Exciting, right?
PS: Tired of Arabica and Robusta? We will be releasing something very funky soon…
Part 1: The Farmers and Coffee Cooperatives.
By now you’ve seen his name on the box and in a few other places. And because these people, the farmers, are so important, it’s time to meet him properly.
Meet Wahyu Setiono, founder of the Kojoyo Cooperative. He majored in theology and is a true coffee-processing guru.
He is the one responsible for making this coffee, the one you’re drinking right now, not only possible, but also distinct from typical Indonesian coffees. Without him, the coffee would still exist and be picked, but it wouldn’t be processed the way it is today. It would be a standard Indonesian coffee: earthy, full-bodied, and without the fruit notes you’re tasting now. (See Part 2 for why that is.)
Wahyu trained at the Java Coffee Legend School in both cupping and processing, and he brought all that knowledge to Kojoyo.
And what is Kojoyo? Well, Wahyu didn’t do this alone. It takes a football team… or so… and a few more.
One farmer alone cannot produce and pick enough coffee for the global market. The coffee you are drinking right now comes from 250 different farmers across 6 districts in the Temanggung region of Indonesia. Two hundred fifty farmers to supply just this one coffee to the world.
Let me put that into perspective. A trained picker, a coffee harvester, can pick around 100 kilograms of coffee cherries per day if all trees are full and ready to be harvested. And of course they only pick ripe fruit. For specialty coffee, they definitely do.
After removing the fruit and drying the beans to the correct moisture content, and after sorting out the damaged, bug eaten, or moldy beans, we are left with around 15 percent of the original amount. That means only 15 kilograms of green coffee from 100 kilograms of harvested cherries. Crazy, right?
A bag of coffee that we order is 60 kilograms, so it takes about four full days of picking just to collect the cherries for one bag. Then come weeks of processing and drying. You see, it takes a lot of people to make coffee.
And these farmers do not all have the equipment needed to produce specialty coffee or to process it the way it is done now. Everyone would need a depulper, the machine that squeezes the seed you are drinking out of the fruit. Everyone would need fermentation tanks and the knowledge of how to use them.
And that is where cooperatives come into play.
A coffee Cooperative: Kojoyo
In 2019 Wahyu started Kojoyo. In the picture you see some of the members, Wahyu, and the team from This Side Up visiting them and standing in the middle of a coffee jungle.
As mentioned, there are 250 different farmers in Kojoyo. All of them bring their coffee to the cooperative’s main station for processing, and Wahyu takes care of the rest. Each farmer still has their own lots and their own farms, and they can choose where to bring their coffee. There are also local middlemen who sell to larger middlemen, but in the past this was rarely beneficial for the farmers.
In the cooperative they have a voice. They work together to procure equipment and they share knowledge. That is why they choose to join a cooperative and produce coffee together, instead of working alone and simply selling off their coffee.
Of course, they must provide a certain level of quality. That is expected. But high quality is paid fairly, and because of that everyone can provide for their families, making coffee a truly livable business, something it has not always been.
Cheers to cooperatives. Together we are strong.
Relaxing after a day of work. Maybe you should also take a short break and relax and come back when you feel like reading more.
Part 2: What makes this coffee special?
Look at the back of the bag that you purchased. There is a lot of text, but it is important. These attributes, like Country, Height, and Processing, are some of the most important factors that influence your coffee. Let me start this chapter by telling you what the biggest difference is and one of the biggest taste drivers.
The height at which the coffee is grown.
Supermarket coffee comes from Indonesia. Does it taste like this one? No. Starbucks coffee also comes from Indonesia. Does it taste like this one? Hell no. Is it more expensive per cup? Oh yes it is.
So why is height so important?
Well, coffee is a plant. Not a bean, but a plant that bears fruit. It absorbs taste from its surroundings, just like wine, and it develops its own flavor from the soil. But if I rush my coffee plant into maturing as fast as possible because I need to sell as much as possible, there is no time for the flavor to develop.
Heigh grown at: 1600-1800m over sea level
Your coffee is grown at 1600 to 1800 meters above sea level. Look at the picture and the view. This is where your coffee comes from, and at this height coffee grows slowly. It can take up to five years to mature and start bearing fruit. But this slow growth gives the coffee time to develop good flavors, to soak up characteristics from its surroundings. The fruit becomes sweeter because more sugars form and more aromatics build up.
Up here everything is hand picked. No machines make it into these coffee fields. The farmers can choose to pick only ripe cherries, while a machine would pick ripe and unripe fruit at the same time.
That is why the height at which the coffee is grown is so so so important.
Why altitude matters
Cooler nights slow down how cherries ripen, the air is thinner. The longer they stay on the tree, the more natural sugars and aromatic compounds they build. Slow ripening means deeper sweetness and more layered flavours in the cup.
The country and its coffee: Indonesia
Coffee has shaped Indonesia for more than three centuries. The Dutch planted Arabica on Java in the 1600s, and by the 1700s the word Java had literally become another word for coffee in Europe.
Later, plant disease and economic pressure pushed many farmers toward Robusta, which grows faster and is more resilient. Quality went down, volume went up, and Indonesia became known for coffee that was strong, earthy, and not very fruity.
Today, more than two million smallholder families grow coffee across Indonesia’s thousands of islands. Most farms are tiny — often less than two hectares — and most farmers sell their freshly picked cherries or wet parchment to local middlemen. These middlemen pay prices tied to the global commodity market, not to the effort it actually takes to grow the coffee. The farmers hand over their cherries the same day, and never see them again.
Most of those cherries are then wet-hulled. A drying method developed to cope with Indonesia’s humidity. It is fast and efficient, but it gives the classic Indonesian taste:
big body, low acidity, earthy, sometimes a little woody or smoky. Good for weight and strength.
Not so good if you want brightness, fruit and clarity.
Wahyu and the Kojoyo Cooperative wanted something different, something that could stand proudly next to expressive coffees from Ethiopia or Colombia. As you read above, growing at high altitude gives the coffee more sugars and potential flavor. But to make this coffee truly shine, they needed one more thing:
a very special way of processing it.
And that’s where we go next.
Double Fermentation – The Processing
Processing is what happens after the cherries are picked from the trees. There are different types of processing, most commonly washed and natural. We will get to those types once we have the beans for it. The next Kenyan coffee will be washed for example.
But with this coffee, Wahyu really took his processing knowledge and brought the coffee to the next level.
Instead of the aforementioned wet-hulling, which would have probably destroyed our beautifully high grown coffee, he went another way.
First, he left the coffee cherry seeds inside the fruit for three days. Natural microbes live on the fruit and begin a fermentation by transforming the sugars in these extremely sweet cherries (sweet because they grow slowly) into their byproducts.
This is basic fermentation, the same process you find in kombucha or sourdough bread.
At the same time, the cherries lose moisture, which concentrates the flavor more and more.
After three days, Wahyu takes the cherries and submerges them in water tanks, creating a seal that lets air out but not in. This is called an anaerobic fermentation. It stops the beans from drying out but continues the fermentation, creating more funky and fruity flavors. Again, think of kombucha. It is only tea, but once the microbes do their work it becomes a sparkling, tangy drink.
Here, Wahyu ferments the cherries for four additional days so the fruit notes become pronounced. Instead of earthy flavors, we get fruitiness and tropical character all around.
Before shipping the coffee to us, the cherry flesh is removed, and then the coffee is dried so it does not go moldy. In the picture you see cherries after fermentation. The color is not as intense as in the first picture of Wahyu holding cherries or on the coffee tree.
I want to highlight once more that without Wahyu’s processing this taste would not have been possible. But it also takes a sweet, sugary coffee cherry to ferment well. This is why I believe that the height the coffee is grown at is one of the key factors for coffee quality.
I hope you can see how these factors make this coffee different from other Indonesian coffees and how special it is to drink. It is a mix of nature and human processing. Absolutely fantastic.
Part 3: Roasting the Coffee
Take a look at the different beans using the slider.
On the left you see a traditional dark roast, low quality, roasted long and hot.
On the right is your coffee.
Even if we ignore the dramatic editing in the first picture, you will immediately notice the difference: the beans you are drinking are much lighter, closer to a caramel tone. That is because I roasted this coffee medium-light on purpose.
Why
Because this roast level brings out exactly what Indonesia, and this altitude and processing, naturally give us: fruitiness, sweetness, and that lemonade like acidity.
If I roasted this coffee darker and longer, two things would happen:
Sugars would break down during the so called Maillard reaction, meaning less sweetness
Bitterness would increase due to pyrolysis, meaning more of that burnt roast taste
All of that would counteract what we want to achieve with this coffee: fruit forward, lemonade and light acidity similar to tropical fruits. Especially if you have ever had a tropical fruit, you know how SWEET they are. And that is what I want in this coffee from Indonesia.
Some notes on spotting bad roasts and beans:
You are drinking specialty coffee, which means the beans were hand sorted and defects were removed one by one. Literally by hand. This gets you only the best beans.
Now look at the dark roasted example on the left. See the black burned spots Notice the broken beans in the top left And the shiny oily beans
All of these contribute to bitterness and bad flavors.
Even worse, oils on the surface of coffee beans are a sign of heavy roasting, and those oils turn rancid over time, giving the coffee an unpleasant, stale taste. With dark roasts, you basically have to hope the beans are fresh before those oils start seeping out.
Specialty light roasts, on the other hand, can stay delicious for years, and some even improve with time. Dark roasts… not so much.
Maillard Reaction
The browning reaction in cooking, the same one that makes bread crust taste amazing, browns vegetables and gives seared food its flavor.
But roast too long, and those sugars break down… and sweetness disappears. Ever forgotten a food in the pan while frying?
Part 4: The full price breakdown.
Probably you have never thought about how much green coffee costs, how much the farmer gets from the price you pay, and who actually benefits from the price once the coffee has been sold in the supermarket or taken from the shelf.
Here, you have full transparency and full visibility. I want you to know exactly where your money goes, because I find it so so important that the people who make the coffee get paid well. This is what brought me into specialty coffee. That is why I am still here, and because of the taste of course. And the only way to understand that is transparency in the supply chain.
Shortly on some challenges. It can be tough to get information about the farmer, about pictures, and about working conditions. So you need good partners. There are some roasteries here in Sweden that have direct contact with farms and can import their own coffee. We cannot, as we are too small, but we can have partners who are as transparent as we want to be. That is why we work with This Side Up, an importer of green coffee to Europe, that even goes as far as sharing its contracts with the farmers with us, ensuring that we see where our money goes.
With that said, let us dive in. Click on the single points to receive an explanation.
The Price I pay: 12,77€/kg green coffee
This does not include shipping. A pallet costs 130€ from Rotterdam, including storage and port, to Sweden. That goes on top. Additionally, every roast loses around 10 to 15 percent of weight through moisture loss. So suddenly the kilo of beans costs 14,43€ if we consider a 13 percent loss. And on top of that come the packaging materials.
What the Farmer gets: 8,88€/kg green coffee
This is called “farm gate”, meaning the price that is given to the farmer when the coffee leaves their farm. Their work is done and they are ready for the next year’s harvest. For this coffee it is 70 percent of the total price, which is amazing. This is due to the high quality that the farmers deliver. In the past, coffee prices have been trending around 2 to 4€ per kilo.
Exporter (Ontosoroh): 0,62€/kg green coffee
Most countries require an exporting company. It takes someone to file paperwork and handle logistics. Here it is Ontosoroh. They cover their costs for transportation, warehousing, rebagging, final quality control, freight, and customs.
Shipping and Customs: 1,27€/kg green coffee
Logistics companies are expensive, and coffees are shipped on large ships around the globe. This costs money, but we need the coffee here. This price includes only the shipping to the Netherlands, to Rotterdam.
Financing: 0,72€/kg green coffee
This Side Up has to pay for tons and tons of coffee all at once and wants the farmers to receive their money immediately, not wait until the costs have been recouped. However, they do not have the capital to put everything upfront. That is why they need to take out a loan to pay for these amounts of coffee. This is the cost for these loans.
Regenerative Organic Premium: 0,06€/kg green coffee
This is a premium on all coffees going through this importer, meant to accelerate the farmers’ own regenerative agriculture projects and support regenerative coffee farming.
Importer (This Side Up): 1,22€/kg green coffee
This Side Up’s compensation covers traveling to the country, sourcing the coffee, importing, sample roasting, paying their staff, warehousing, grading, and roasting and shipping samples to us and other roasters to try before purchasing.
This is it, this is the complete breakdown of the cost and the money flow of this coffee. The concept here is called direct trade. It is not 100 percent direct, as that would mean from Wahyu directly to us, but it is as direct as we can make it currently.
The normal way for coffee is:
Farmer → Local middleman → Bigger city middleman → Auction or stock market → Sold → Logistics → Export → Import → Reseller → Roaster.
And each part has to get paid, mostly to the loss of the farmer.
Look at the graph below. Much cleaner. Note that it shows who is responsible for which part. I really appreciate the work everyone is doing to benefit the ones producing the coffee and making this business a sustainable one. THANK YOU.
The coffee value chain for this coffee.
Part 5: A fun brew!
With this recipe we want to have some fun. If you are looking for a traditional Moccamaster, you can find it on the starting page of the Experience. This recipe is curtesy of the Australian roaster Ply and I find that it is excellent to draw out the fruity notes of the coffee!
Lets start!
- Weigh 20 g of Coffee
- Prepare 150 grams of ice in a karafe!
- Grind it Medium to course. We want this brew to go really quickly!!! Think course salt, okay maybe a bit finer. Time from water filling to out should be 1 minute.
- Place your dripper on an empty carafe and add the 20 grams of coffee.
- Do one long, slow pour. No blooming!
Add 180–200 grams of water over the grounds in about 30 seconds.
Let it drip through. Total drawdown should be around 1 minute.
(If it takes way longer, your grind is too fine. - When it’s done, move the dripper, with the used grounds still inside, onto your second carafe, the one filled with ice.
- Time to “rebrew”. We do flash pours so we are only trying to extract fruit and Sweetness! No bitterness! In 2–3 small pours, pour 50 grams of the fresh hot coffee back through the grounds. Let it drip into the ice carafe. This should take about 1 more minute. Strength tip: More small pours = higher extraction Fewer pours = lighter (nice to highlight fruit and floral notes!)
- DONE!
Enjoy this iced drink!
Look, do I brew this every day No. I like to go with a simple Moccamaster. But do I like to pretend I am sitting at the beach with a fruity cocktail sometimes Yes absolutely. I like this coffee this way, and sometimes I take a straw and drink it right out of there. Give it a try and let coffee be fun. Let me know what you think about it.
Your delicious cup
All right, this is the end for now. I really hope you enjoyed this journey with me and continue to support Experience Coffee. We hope to bring a new coffee soon with everything included. The Experiences are not set in stone, but we adjust them based on the special characteristics each coffee gives us. If you liked this, check out the video version as well. Review us on Google Maps, and we hope to see you in the roastery.
– Edin
All photos kindly provided by This Side Up.
Other photos are by me or taken by my partner! Thank you for your support!
Indonesia Double Ferment
Wahyu Setiono