East Timor Ermera Eratoi Organic

This Crown Jewel from Royal Coffee is an absolute treat! Unlike other coffees in the Oceania region, this one is fully washed resulting in a clean, crisp profile but with plenty of body to spare. Look for notes of apricot, maple syrup, green grape and pecan.

Arrival Date: February 5th, 2021

Acidity & Brightness: Mild acidity, quite sweet

Balance & Finish: Balanced with a clean finish

Body & Texture: Full bodied, syrupy

Flavors: Apricot, maple syrup, green grape and pecan

Grade: Very hard and dense, grown at 1300-1500 masl

Certifications: Organic

Processing:  Fully Washed

Varietals: Typica and Timor Hybrid (Hibrido de Timor)

Roasting: Since this coffee is fully washed, we prefer it in the Light Medium to Medium range (City + to Full City). You can feel free to take it darker, but we'd avoid any oil on the bean. For best results, extend roasting a bit prior to first crack.

Reminder:  This coffee is raw.  You have to roast it before brewing. 

Our Review: "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. 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. The villages (near Ermera) 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 15 select farmers from the Ducurai village, part of the “Eratoi” group, whose name translates to “water spring”, after the source of a nearby waterfall. Coffee in Letefoho is not young. 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. During harvest coffee is picked painstakingly 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, for example, has greatly improved farmers’ ability to consistently meet quality standards for moisture content and water activity." -Royal Coffee

Most coffee from Oceania and the Indonesian archipelago is wet-hulled, which is a traditional semi-washed method of coffee processing. This coffee, however, is fully washed resulting in a much cleaner cup than it's neighbors while still maintaining the syrupy body and mild acidity Indonesian coffee is known for. Balanced and quite sweet (without being overwhelmingly sweet), this coffee has a delightfully clean finish! We caught tons of flavors in the cup but the ones that really stood out as the coffee cooled were apricot, maple syrup, grape and pecan. We like roasting this coffee right at Full City or even just a hair lighter to really bring out everything the cup has to offer, but you can certainly drive it up to Full City + to round out the acidity even further. This dense bean takes on heat well and your best results while roasting will come from lots of heat early then dialing it back and coasting during the middle of the roast up to first crack.