Is Top Gold Mandheling Real? What Variety is Gold Mandheling? Exactly, This Is It

FrontStreet Coffee - Introduction to Golden Mandheling and Gold Top Mandheling

Mandheling is not the name of a region, a town, a port, or a coffee variety. It is in fact a mishearing of the Indonesian Mandailing people. During the Second World War, when Japan occupied Indonesia, a Japanese soldier drank an exceptionally fragrant cup of coffee in a cafe and asked the owner what it was. The owner misread the question and thought he was being asked where he came from, so he answered "Mandheling." After the war the soldier remembered that coffee and commissioned an Indonesian merchant to ship 15 tons of it to Japan, where it became an unexpected hit. That merchant is the PWN (Purnawan) coffee company of today. The Mandheling we know is grown around Lake Toba in northern Sumatra, and the finished cup has a distinctive herbal, forest-floor fragrance.

Any discussion of Golden Mandheling has to begin with Mandheling itself. Because of the climate in the Lintong region of Sumatra and the level of local farming technique, and because water there is precious, the earliest processing was simple sun-drying, which gave unstable results. It was replaced by a semi-dry method similar to Brazil's. Indonesia's humidity, however, makes it impossible to leave sticky cherries outdoors for two or three days the way Brazilians do; in Sumatra they would mold. So after only several hours to a day of drying, once moisture reaches 20-30% and the mucilage has not yet set, the cherries are bought by collectors and taken to simple mills, where machines scrape off the mucilage to prevent over-fermentation and sourness.

In other words, Lintong Mandheling has its mucilage scraped off before the cherries are dry, and that is the main reason Mandheling shows lower fruit acidity and a heavier body. After a little more drying, moisture inside the parchment sits at around 18%. Finally, exporters in Medan buy the still-undried cherries and either spread them in large drying yards or use machines to bring moisture down to 12% for storage. The drying of Lintong Mandheling therefore relies on a three-stage division of labour among farmers, collectors and exporters. Its characteristic herbal and woody aromas come from the high humidity and this three-stage handling of the mucilage, a method rare anywhere in the world and one that accidentally produced Mandheling's low-acid, thick, mellow character.

Because the three-stage method has so many variables and the processing is crude, Mandheling is arguably the least stable specialty coffee in terms of quality. It arrives full of broken, moldy, black and unripe beans, which is a headache for roasters: considerable time must be spent removing defects before roasting. Even so, this has not dented its popularity. To reduce the defect rate, the Japanese applied stricter quality control more than a decade ago. After the dried green beans are screened by density and colour, they pass through four rounds of hand sorting, producing Golden Mandheling with a dark green colour and a uniform appearance.

Among Mandhelings, Golden Mandheling is the most sought after. True Golden Mandheling refers to product from PWN and BIWA. Roughly speaking, "PWN" became a synonym for guaranteed quality and was the first to hold the "Golden Mandheling" trademark; the Japanese company BIWA therefore had to register "Gold Top Mandheling" instead.

BIWA's Gold Top Mandheling is made from hand-picked, hand-processed beans from a limited number of farms. After hand processing, the selected beans are wet-hulled, sun-dried and hulled, then dried again, cleaned twice and hand-sorted four times, guaranteeing consistent quality.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

FrontStreet Coffee's PWN Golden Mandheling comes from Indonesia's PWN company and is the finest expression of the wet-hulled style. PWN selects green beans of 18 mesh or larger and demands fewer than three defective beans in every 300g sample to meet the top G1 grade, then applies three rounds of hand sorting to clear what remains. The result is a cleaner cup and a stronger, sweeter finish than ordinary Mandheling.

Expect a thick, syrupy body with very low acidity: dark chocolate and caramel up front, then the wild herbal, cedar and earthy notes that only Sumatran wet-hulling produces. It is an excellent choice for anyone who dislikes sour coffee.

For pour-over, use 15g of coffee with a 1:15 ratio and 87-88C water at a coarse-sugar grind. Bloom with 30ml, pour to 100ml, then finish with a gentle 95ml centre pour for 225ml in total; the three-stage pour highlights the caramel sweetness along with chocolate and nut notes. FrontStreet Coffee's Lintong Mandheling, roasted medium-dark, brews the same way, and for espresso the FrontStreet Classic Blend pairs a medium-dark Mandheling with a creamy Brazilian base, adding butter, roasted chestnut and caramel on top of sandalwood, herbal and spice accents.