Java Sunda Badak

PROCESS: Washed
VARIETY: Java
ELEVATION: 1,200-1,700 meters
ROAST: Medium-Dark
BODY: Smooth
NOTES: Caramel, dried citrus, herbaceous, and toffee flavors with syrupy sweetness and tart acidity

“Sunda Badak” is a name for the indigenous Rhinoceros to the island.

West Java is a region with a tropical monsoon climate, and geography made up of a chain of active and extinct volcanos known as the Ring of Fire. The heart of western Java is the Priangan Plateau, a highland area that is home to the Sundanese people. Unlike eastern Java, where coffee is produced on predominately government-owned estates, coffee producers throughout the west are smallholders who deliver to mills and collection points. The elevation, conditioned varieties, and weather lends this region to producing the highest quality coffee in Java, and throughout much of Indonesia.

This coffee is a signature coffee from Frinsa Collective. Day lots are selected to match a specific profile that is representative of the Preanger region and quality premiums are paid to separate these lots. The majority of farmers in this region are small-holders delivering wet-parchment or wet-hulled green coffee to a central mill operated by Frinsa Collective where drying and dry milling is completed and quality control is executed to separate out lots to match this profile.

Coffee was introduced throughout the islands of Indonesia by the Dutch in the 1600s, and was first exported by the Dutch East India Company in the early 1700s. Java was the first of the islands to cultivate coffee, and that long history with the plant on the land is part of the reason that coffee is generically known as "java." In the 1860s and 1870s, a coffee-leaf-rust epidemic decimated the coffee market in Indonesia, and led to the abandonment of many estates by the Dutch followed by the growth of smallholder growers on the islands, which exists to this day.

The Java varietal itself has lineage from Ethiopian landrace types; it was selected and transplanted to Cameroon in the mid-20th century; introduced in Costa Rica 1991.