View of Lake Toba from Sipinsur park.
by Drew Zent
From November 4th to 11th, I made my annual visit with our producer partners in Sumatra. This year, Dale Schotte and Talon Cooksey from Park Avenue Coffee were able to join me on my trip.
After 36 hours of travel, we arrived at the Medan airport and traveled via van to Siborong-Borong to meet with a producer at a larger cooperative. This cooperative receives a lot of coffee from the western side of Lake Toba and other surrounding areas. It is much larger than all of our partner warehouses. Additionally, we noticed that most of the coffees were dried on tarps and not in green houses. This is much different than what we normally see around the southern shores of Lake Toba in the towns surrounding Lintongnihuta. In discussions with the director of the cooperative, he told us that his inventory is down considerably from the year prior with his current inventory being about 30% of what it was a year ago.
From this cooperative, we traveled to Berstagi for and settled in for the evening. We used this area as our home base during our visit to the area.
Over the next few days, we visited with many of our producer partners and farmers around the southern shores of Lake Toba with concentrating around the town of Lintongnihuta. Our first producer visit was a small farm on the outskirts of town. He has about 1,000 trees and also purchases parchment from other farmers. I have visited this farm each year for the past 3 years and it has been amazing to observe how he has grown significantly with buying more parchment from other farmers while increasing his own production. We also were able to witness the harvesting of some coffees and the depulping process.
From here we went to another producer who I have met on prior visits. The first thing I noticed was that he didn’t have very much coffee in his warehouse or in his green houses. Usually, by the first of November, our partner warehouses are full of coffee. This was not the case this year. Each of the warehouses we visited were practically empty and all were saying the same thing. They expect the volume of the main crop to be about 30% lower this year than last year. This was opposite of our crop report from late summer. We believed that the weather was very cooperative and the maturation of the coffee was proceeding as normal. In inspection of many of the farms, the coffee seems to exist, but only delayed. We noticed a lot of fruit on the trees, but it just wasn’t ripe yet. This was very consistent with many of the farms that we visited. So we are still expecting a good flow of coffee, but just late. It could even be that the fly crop that is in March/April might be stronger than usual.
On Wednesday, we spent traveling around and visiting more producers. Each had the same story. Not much if any coffee in the warehouses, and how they expected the production to be down by about 30%. We witnessed the delivery of parchment to our partners warehouse. Each farmer or collector might bring in anywhere from 5kg of parchment to a full 100kg bag. The parchment is checked for quality and then, if the coffee is approved, the farmer or collector will be paid upon delivery. The producers buying parchment has evolved over the past few years. All of the coffees used to travel from the collectors to the market for sale. By moving some of the purchasing of parchment at their own warehouses, the process has been simplified a little bit for the farmer and the producer.
Thursday, we were able to drive around and visit with more farmers and producers. The difference this day is that we traveled by motorcycle instead of by car. This enabled us to see many more farms and understand further that the coffees were just delayed, but expect the crop to be down a bit, but not the 30% as mentioned by the farmers.
This afternoon, we cupped new crop samples from many of our producer partners around the southern shores of Lake Toba. All of the coffees were wet hulled and sundried, which is the standard preparation for the area. The coffees were very nice, good acidity, heavy body with notes of cedar and butterscotch. As we were early in the crop, none of the samples were ready yet for export still needed to be sorted in order to produce our Mutu Batak, Raja Batak and Boru Batak.
On Friday we traveled to the market in Dolok Sanguul. It is always and experience to witness the chaos that is the market. In the past, almost all of the coffee in the region were traded at the market. There were markets on specific days in each major town. Now the main market is each Friday in Dolok Sanguul. Everything from coffee, shoes, school supplies, fresh fish from Lake Toba, to many other items were available at the market. To say the least, it was complete chaos. Our partners have a stand in specific areas and the coffees are brought to them. The coffees were inspected by feel and smell. If they coffees were approved, then it was measured and the farmer or collector will be paid upon delivery. We witnessed James and his wife purchase about 50-100kg sacks of parchment that day. After the market, they load up their coffee and take it to their warehouse to unload and finish drying.
We spent Friday evening on Samosir Island located in the middle of Lake Toba to catch our breath and relax for an evening preparing for an early departure on Saturday back to Medan.
After our return to Medan we hosted our annual dinner at a seafood restaurant for our staff in Medan to say thank you for another great year and that we are looking forward to 2020.
