Tasting Notes Fruit Candies and toasted marshmallow in the aroma. A full bodied sweet cup with a creamy texture and lingering aftertaste. Lactic Natural Process For their Lactic Process, cherries are carefully picked, cleaned, and sorted, then fermented in anaerobic tanks with added starter cultures, before being dried under the sun on raised beds. After the coffee is dried, it’s hulled and sorted to be prepared and packed for exportation. A VILLAGE SUSTAINED BY COFFEE - story of Mr. Muhlisin by Belift Team’s Kenny Soewondo We met Pak Muhlis when we were searching for green beans for our roastery. When we tasted his natural-processed coffee, we really liked it and used it for our roastery for a long time before we were inspired to do more for the farmers. Pak Muhlis went to university at the Brawijaya University in the city of Malang, where he learned about many things including farming techniques, farm management, the business side. He then went to IPB (Institut Pertanian Bogor) / Bogor Farming Institute where he underwent more intensive learning for farming coffee. Initially he tried to market the coffee from Argopuro to local markets, but the prices were very low back then when he started, so the local farmers in Argopuro chose to plant Tobacco or Corn instead. He came up with a plant, in order to optimize the coffee potential of his region, he had to find other customers than just people in the traditional marketplaces. He then explored the markets of coffeeshops /cafes in bigger cities, like Jakarta, where he found his way to many roasteries, cafes, coffeeshops that wanted to use Argopuro coffee beans, and were willing to pay more for them so he can make it more sustainable. After he graduated he went back to his village and concentrated on his efforts for the region. Day by day, month by month, year by year, his sales grew and grew, and with the new rewarding prices, farmers in the Argopuro region were switching to coffee plants, setting off a chain reaction that propelled his region into a bigger, more focused, coffee plantation with high specialty standards. The Tlogosari Village, where the coffee beans are grown, has a social non-profit organization set up by the villagers for the community's well-beings, and the organization is called Pokmas Walida (Perkumpulan Masyarakat Wali Santri Sabda Ria Nada). 20% of the profit from the coffee beans sales go directly to the social non-profit organization, which run a local K-12 school that educate the villagers in his village, some small percentage goes to the government in exchange to letting the villagers grow coffee there. He made the efforts to educate the local villagers for free, because many of the villagers are not prioritizing education, with many of them opting to quit school after elementary school to settle and work as farmers. His background of having went to universities has made him very concerned with the education level of his home region (many are practicing very early marriages, around ages 14-16, and not aware of more opportunities), and he decided that he was going to be the one to come up with a solution to bring more value-add to his village His coffee is grown at elevations of around 1200 masl in the footsteps of Mount Argopuro, in Situbondo Regency, East Java Province of Java Island. The reason he has natural-processed coffee is because water is very scarce in his area and the government has not been active in helping build irrigation systems there. The harvest season begins around early May and ends around late July. The coffee varieties grown include Lini S288 and Kartika.
