Roast: Light

Country: Indonesia

Region: Simalungun

Producer: Back Bay Estate

Processing: Wet Hulled

Altitude: 1400masl

Tasting Notes

Geranium blossoms, cane sugar, white grapes, Apricot and tobacco. A Sumatran coffee with an Ethiopian heart. 

An exceptionally clean Wet-hulled coffee this Ethiopian cultivar still wafts of it's roots: floral aromatics, sweet grapes and tea. a very sweet and full-bodied cup. one that aims for elegance over outright power.

A very unique Sumatran coffee. Single variety lots of any type are very hard to come by from this origin. Typically several varieties are scattered about in fields. This coffee is mostly processed as a natural by the farm. We featured the natural process version of this coffee in 2024.  For this year we asked them to produce a special lot for us in the classic Sumatran wet-hulled style to taste the effect of the processing on a coffee we were already familiar with. Our lot was processed from cherries harvested in March and April 2024.

Abysinnia Variety

In 1928, coffee researcher PJS Cramer travelled from Java to Abyssinia (today known as Ethiopia), and returned with new varieties of coffee seeds to plant. One such variety proved both exquisite and resilient to the debilitating leaf rust disease: Abyssinia. The variety was later planted in Gayo, in North Sumatra, and it can still be found on some farms there today.

Selections from Abyssinia trees eventually made their way to Cameroon from the island of Java. Further selections of the plant were made in Cameroon and released as the 'Java' variety which in the decades since has become popular with growers around the world: Nicaragua, Colombia, Laos.

A pure heirloom variety, Abyssinia is slow growing and produces a single annual harvest of exceptional quality coffee fruit. The large bean size and elongated shape are the trademarks of this variety.

Back Bay Estate

Lisa & Leo’s Organic® Coffee was established in 2010 By Lisa and Leo Wiriadjaja. A lifelong dream of having a coffee farm turned into an ambition to start a company and grow a business based on their personal values that would guide every aspect of the work, the land and the products produced from the land. Located in Simalungun, North Sumatra, the Their organic coffee farm: Back Bay Estate and gardens is complimented by a Macadamia Orchard, a wet mill facility, an ECO Tourism Farm Stay Lodge connected to a Coffee Processing Education Center and the protected Siamang Forest. 

All of their Arabica coffees were started from seed and are grown organically and Biodynamically at elevations of 1400 to 1500+MASL.

On a trip to Gayo in 2012, Leo was fortunate to find a crop of Abyssinia owned by  a third generation farmer who was willing to part with seedlings that had volunteered under the mature trees. The seedlings made it back to Simalungun in his backpack and 55 trees survived. The timing of the 2012 visit was not during harvest season, so there were only green cherry.  In 2013 Leo returned to harvest cherries from the trees for propegation.  From those seeds they were able to plant an additional 100 trees. Thanks to this growers generosity, Back Bay Estate now has a healthy crop of Abyssinia. This is a special crop for them and they have since increased the crop by taking cuttings from two mother trees and propagating these into trees each year for the last 3 years. They now have 280 trees producing around 500lb of specialty grade coffee per season.

 Thank you Lisa and Leo for producing this 20kg (44lb) lot of very special coffee for us!

They typically process this variety as a natural. Harvesting ripe cherries and drying them on raised beds for 28-35 days. Covered to protect them from the elements and reduce UV.

These trees only produce around 500Lb of coffee each season. Almost all of which they sell to their customers within Indonesia. We are grateful they were willing to share 44lb of this special coffee with us.