Description
Timor-Leste, or East Timor, takes up the eastern half of the greater Timor island, part of the Indonesian archipelago and not far from the northern coast of Australia. It is a young republic with a long and chaotic political history, having only achieved full independence in 2002, after almost 500 years of consecutive occupations by the Portuguese, the Dutch, and Indonesia.
Timor-Leste’s coffee is small in overall scale but highly significant to the Timorese, 25% of whom rely on coffee production for their livelihood. The island’s inland forests also happen to be historically significant, being the origin of coffee’s most adaptive genetic cross—the Timor Hybrid—a natural breeding of local robusta and typica trees that was identified in the 1920s, and whose vigorous genetics can be found in countless timor-based cultivars in almost every producing country today. The island’s isolation has also allowed for a unique preservation of endemic typica variety coffees, whose purity and diversity resembles that of nearby Papua New Guinea, and expresses similarly in the cup.
Tasting Notes: A nice and clean taste, good from light to dark. Mostly these beans will appeal to medium-dark roast fans but being an exceptionally clean cup, it has some lovely balance and is quite tasty at lighter roasts. Similar to its Indonesian cousins (except washed processed), it gets real hefty into the dark roasts promoting smoky and chocolaty tones with stronger spice notes. Lighter roasting it is more delicate and floral, slightly fruity with some detectable lemony crispness, sweet edged, medium bodied with hints of a chocolaty factor.
Roasting Notes: After drinking this cup at a multitude of roasts and curves, we though it worked best at a strong medium roast. Everyone liked it lighter but building a smoother and richer dark tone by pushing the roast made it a wonderful daily drinker. A quicker ramp up (roast higher temps for less time) left the cup a bit crisper and more interesting. If shooting for lighter roasting, would flip the curve and drag it out a bit to develop some darker tones at the light to medium roast levels. Easy to roast, good screen of coffee.
Coming from family owned farms organized around the Cooperativa Café Timor (CCT), which has more than 20,000 members who live in the Ainaro, Ermera and Lequisa districts of East Timor. Coffee cultivation on East Timor was originally established over 400 years ago by Portuguese colonists but leaf rust destroyed all production until a new coffee varietal called Híbrido de Timor was introduced in the 1900s. Today, the average small producer cultivates coffee on less than one hectare of land. CCT was established in 1994 with the help of the USDA and the NCBA (National Cooperative Business Association) to help small producers market their coffee internationally. Through a free healthcare initiative, CCT has funded the operation of seven rural clinics, three mobile clinic teams and eleven community healthcare teams that have treated more than two million patients since 2001.
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