Indonesian Coffee is Cool Now
Seniman Coffee Studio is one of my favorite cafes to work from in Bali. I’ve spent many a long afternoon nursing an iced cappuccino while perched on a chair. The coffee is good, strong, and it’s perfect when the Balinese heat has tired me out. One day, I figured, Why not reach out to someone at the company and see if they’d be open to chatting?
I spoke with Rodney Glick, director of the specialty coffee brand Seniman Industries and co-founder of Seniman’s parent company, Karana Spesialis Kopi. Karana is a coffee processing company with involvement in all stages of the coffee supply chain while Seniman is the customer-facing retail front.
Historically, countries that grow and produce coffee, such as Ecuador, Brazil, Kenya, and Indonesia — the so-called “coffee belt” — export their coffee beans abroad. People in North America and Europe are drinking the good stuff while the people living in the coffee-producing countries are making do with the cheap instant coffee.
But that’s starting to change with the rise of “origin coffee.” Over the past few years, countries that produce coffee have started to experience a big boom in domestic demand. The middle class in these countries is starting to grow, and so there are more people willing (and able) to spend their money on non-necessities. Like coffee.
This emphasis on local coffee also means that coffee-producing countries are taking more pride in their coffee. For Indonesian coffee producers, this means marketing that emphasizes the rich diversity of flavor profiles of beans sourced from different regions. From Gayo and West Java to Flores and Papua, Indonesian coffee is cool now. Long gone are the days when coffee used to be only for the elite Indonesians, who hunted for the Italian illy brand as a hallmark of quality, even though Italy doesn’t grow coffee and illy mixes and matches coffee beans from all over the world to create blends.
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This shift in the coffee industry of coffee-producing regions has implications for global coffee. As the middle classes in coffee-producing countries purchase domestic coffee, there might not be as much left to export to countries that don’t produce it. Rodney warned me of the day in the not-too-distant future when coffee prices in the United States rise. I’ll cry when a cappuccino from a specialty coffee shop in the United States costs more than $8.
Rodney is also the inventor of the nation’s first coffee flavor wheel, Roda Rasa Kopi Indonesia. To help you decide what to order, a hand-drawn coffee taster’s wheel diagram on the wall describes the flavor profile and intensity of each roast. It’s like when wineries tell you the notes behind certain wine types, like pineapple or toffee.
In the coffee world, the coffee tasting wheel has traditionally had a very Western-centric focus. Think: notes being described as strawberry or blackberry — even if this means excluding coffee producers in the coffee belt who might not know what those flavors taste like. Or the flavor references may not reflect the full diversity of flavor profiles. Saying that a certain coffee has notes of banana isn’t very useful for producers in Indonesia and Brazil who are used to hundreds of different kinds of bananas.
The Roda Rasa Kopi Indonesia is a flavor wheel created for Indonesian coffee producers with their needs and experiences in mind. I thought it was so cool, especially when you trace the colonial history of coffee. In Indonesia, coffee cultivation began in the late 1600s and early 1700s, when the Dutch introduced it and promoted plantations for commercial export.
An effort like this helps make coffee flavor profiles more accessible to the people who actually grow it. It’s like coffee-producing countries are reclaiming the coffee industry and rewriting the narrative. As they should.
P.S. If you’re interested in buying Seniman Coffee in the United States, it’s sold at Trader Joe’s. I have no idea what its rebranded name is but it’s definitely one of the Indonesian coffees.
