Tasting Notes: Fresh Mango, Pineapple, Milk Chocolate Coated Raisins
We're excited to introduce our first-ever Timor Leste coffee, thanks to our friends at Kape Diem Coffee Lab, led by Gobie and Daniel.
Kape Diem was founded in 2018 by Daniel Leong and Gobie Rajalingam. Bringing together Gobie's fermentation expertise and Daniel's operational management skills, Kape Diem has pushed the boundaries in farm management, post-harvest processing, roasting, and barista training in Timor-Leste. Since 2019, Kape Diem coffees have repeatedly placed in the top 5 coffees in Timor-Leste’s national cup of excellence-styled coffee quality competition. Today, Kape Diem’s staff include Q-graders, Q-processing professionals, Specialty Coffee Association certified trainers and national brew champions all connected by a shared love of Timor-Leste coffee.
Inspiration behind Lot 216LAB3
At a coffee processing workshop with Lucia Solis in Bandung, Indonesia this year, the Kape Diem team met with Dr. Intan Taufik. Dr. Intan is an Indonesian coffee microbiologist working with Mikael Jasin’s Catur Coffee Company (CCC) on isolating various microbes for use in coffee fermentation. At the same workshop they also had the pleasure of meeting Dandy Darmawan of Ijen Lestari, in East Java, Indonesia. While Dandy’s coffee placed 4th in the inaugural Indonesian Cup of Excellence competition, it was their conversations and shared learnings regarding the use of mossto in coffee fermentation upon which a new friendship was forged.
This coffee (216LAB3) draws on inspiration from coffee processing methods at Ijen Lestari, yeast inputs from Catur Coffee Company and their own fermentations smarts at Kape Diem Coffee Lab. Firstly, they isolated mossto from an anaerobic natural fermentation lot and inoculated the conserved red cherry juices with Saccharomyces yeast and Klebsiella bacteria. Once a rolling fermentation was achieved, the mossto was added to whole coffee cherries and fermented at a low controlled temperature for 75 hours. The whole cherries were transported from where they were harvested in Laclo (1400 masl) to the capital, Dili, at sea level. The lower humidity at sea level creates favourable drying conditions, and the fermented cherries were dried on raised beds for four weeks.
