INDONESIA - Flores Mbohang Lot 4 | Anaerobic Palm Juice Culture Natural

Mbohang is the name of the village where the coffee farm is. 

The name 'mbohang' comes from "mbo", meaning valley and "hang" meaning to eat or to rest. The area is shaded and is a good location to rest from the long walk. Mbohang is in a valley of the central area in the Manggarai Region. In this region the weather is foggy and rainy in the afternoons. The local people have been growing coffee trees since the 1980s in the forest area of Mbohang.

The farm has 42 permanent employees and a extra 98 during the harvest months of April-August. The farm is 600 hectares in size and 1500masl and grows yellow caturra, typica and kartika. 

Coffee grows here in very healthy conditions. Trees have plentiful leaves and are well spaced from one another.  Farmers use dried grass, leaves, and pulped cherry skins from the processing place for their organic fertilizer. Pruning is carried out only when needed, and trees are maintained at a height of around 1.8 meters. Other shade trees grown around the coffee areas including Leucaena leucocephala, Eucalyptus, urophylla, Ficus carica, and Albizia chinensis.

Palm Juice Culture Process

Cherries are picked by farmers in the Mbohang Village, then sent for processing in Ruteng.

They then get sorted for quality and a starter culture is added before the cherries are placed inside tanks for anaerobic fermentation for around 240 to 360 hours. The ambient temperature will be between 15 - 22 degrees in this period.

Starter Culture - It’s fermented palm juice created by a combination of local natural yeast, fungi and microbes which the Local Manggarai people call “mince” for the palm juice, which means sweet. They take the palm juice from the forest then ferment it until it reaches 4.2 pH level. Then the liquid is sprayed to the coffee cherry before we put in the tank for anaerobic fermentation. The pH level of the liquid from the cherry is measured every morning while the coffee is still inside the tanks and the final pH of between 3.8 - 4.0. Fermented cherries then go to the drying beds for around 7-8 weeks until the green bean moisture drops to 10%. The dried pods are then stored in sealed plastic bags and rested for around 3 months. Finally, the pods are hulled and the green beans sorted, packed and sent for export.

Processing decisions are motivated by many factors including market demand, trends, scalability, combined with our drying space availability, weather conditions, as well as team capability.

View more images of this unique coffee location here.