Day 8 | Sumatra Bener Meriah Lychee

This is an estate-grown coffee from Aceh Province, Sumatra’s most famous and prolific production area for specialty wet-hulled profiles. Unlike most coffee in the area, which is traditionally grown by hundreds of smaller farmers and gradually consolidated through processing, collection, and milling, Central Sumatera Coffee operates a 100-hectare estate right in Bener Meriah regency, where they can control the genetics, harvesting, and post-harvest techniques to perfection. 

This is a super unique processing style that uses anaerobic fermentation, yeast inoculation and a co-fermentation with powdered dried fruit to achieve a totally distinct, heavily flavored coffee with perfume like fragrances and sweet, fresh, lychee fruit.

The Bener Meriah estate employs 30 pickers during harvest months, and six specialists for processing. Most of their estate coffee is wet-hulled in the traditional fashion, but this microlot took an entirely different route, blending multiple unique fermentation techniques to augment the final cup, and ultimately processed as a semi-washed.

After picking, the cherry was depulped and fermented anaerobically in sealed containers with the addition of saccharomyces cerevisiae (brewer's yeast), for a total of 48 hours. Once the first fermentation cycle was complete, the containers were opened, dried lychee fruit powder was added, and then they were resealed for another 12 hours. After the full multi-stage 60-hour fermentation, the containers were opened, the parchment washed clean and moved directly to raised screen tables to dry. Once the parchment dried to 35% moisture content it was de-hulled (this is the wet-hulled part) and allowed to finish drying as a raw seed on the raised tables.