Our April coffee of the month is a soft and delicate washed coffee from the Ermera municipality of Timor-Leste. It is balanced with a light acidity and bitterness and a medium-light body. The cup starts with light citrus notes of orange blossom that provide a nice, subtle acidity. The middle of the cup is quite interesting, as the flavors change from spice to sweet as it cools. When hot, mild spice notes of sweet cinnamon follow the floral beginning. As the cup cools, you'll find that sweet raspberry notes develop and overshadow the cinnamon notes. The finish is lingering and sweet with prominent milk chocolate sweetness. 

Roast Color: Medium

Cupping Notes: Milk Chocolate, Orange Blossom, Cinnamon

About the coffee of the month: We feature a new coffee every month. This allows us to explore more of the world of coffee outside of our normal offerings. It is available this month only, while supplies last. 

Story: The Ermera municipality in Timor-Leste is one of the island’s highest in elevation and includes its highest peak, Tatamailau. The villages in the mountain’s vicinity are where Café Brisa Serena (CBS), a social enterprise and exporter, has spent the last 10 years developing smallholder coffee value chains.

This coffee is produced by 10 select farmers from the Ducurai village, whose group is called “Lebudu Kraik”, which translates to “lower wetlands” and comes from their particular location on the mountainside. The Ducurai village is just north of Tatamailau’s peak. Trees are tended to for decades, and due to the lofty, vine-like typica varieties throughout, coffee is often harvested by leaning long wooden ramps against the trunk so that pickers can access the sprawling canopy. Farms range between 0.5 and 1.5 hectares only and tend to be well-shaded by evergreen she-oaks, a natural mulcher and nitrogen fixer. During harvest coffee is picked by hand and processed at home on personal or shared pulping equipment, which is often hand-made using wood and textured metal discs.

After fermenting in small personal containers, the coffee is dried on raised beds and constantly sorted for quality. Many of the current harvesting and processing standards come directly from CBS, who has helped establish specialty protocols and invested in improvements to processing equipment. The addition of drying structures has greatly improved farmers’ ability to consistently meet quality standards for moisture content and water activity. In addition to coffee, Ducurai farmers also manage personal crops of taro and cassava, as well as pigs, goats, fowl, and cows, and many also have personal compost programs in addition to being organic certified.