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

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FrontStreet Coffee - Introduction to Golden Mandheling and Gold Top Mandheling

Mandheling is not a region name, place name, port name, nor a coffee variety name. How did its name originate? In fact, it is a phonetic error of the Indonesian Mandheling ethnic group. During World War II when Japan occupied Indonesia, a Japanese soldier drank exceptionally fragrant coffee at a café. He asked the owner for the name of the coffee, but the owner misunderstood and thought he was asking where he was from, so he replied: "Mandheling." After the war, the soldier recalled the "Mandheling" he had drunk in Indonesia. He then commissioned an Indonesian coffee merchant to ship 15 tons to Japan, which surprisingly became very popular. The name Mandheling spread this way, and that coffee merchant is now the renowned PWN (Purnawan) coffee company. The well-known Mandheling is produced around Lake Toba in northern Sumatra. The finished product has a unique fragrance of herbs and woodlands.

Speaking of the past and present of Golden Mandheling, we must start with Mandheling itself. Due to the climatic conditions in the Lindong region of Sumatra Island, Indonesia, and the level of coffee farming techniques, because local water resources are precious, the initial processing method was sun-drying, but the quality was unstable. So it was changed to a semi-sun-drying method similar to Brazil's. However, Indonesia's climate is humid, and they couldn't dry the sticky coffee pods outdoors for 2-3 days like in Brazil, as this would cause the pods to mold in Indonesia. Therefore, after drying for several hours to a day, when the moisture content reaches 20-30% and the mucilage hasn't yet solidified, the coffee pods are purchased by merchants and taken to simple processing plants where machines scrape off the mucilage to prevent excessive fermentation and sour odors.

In other words, Lindong Mandheling has its mucilage layer scraped off before the pods are dry, which is the main reason for Mandheling's lower fruit acidity and higher body. After slight further drying, the moisture content of the coffee inside the pods is about 18%. Finally, exporters from Medan come to purchase the undried pods, place them in large drying fields or use machines to dry them until the moisture content reaches 12% for storage. From this, we can see that the drying process of Lindong Mandheling, due to farmers' insufficient equipment, adopts a three-stage division of labor among farmers, bean collectors, and exporters. Mandheling's unique herbal fragrance and woody aroma result from the high humidity and three-stage drying of the mucilage layer. This is also a rare processing method worldwide, which accidentally created Mandheling's low-acidity, thick, and mellow flavor characteristics.

Due to the many variables in the three-stage drying method and crude processing techniques, Mandheling can be considered the most unstable specialty coffee in terms of quality. It is filled with broken beans, moldy beans, black beans, and unripe beans, which gives roasters a headache. They need to spend considerable time removing defective beans before roasting. However, this does not diminish people's preference for the rich Mandheling. To improve the problem of high defect rates in Mandheling, Japanese people adopted stricter quality control more than a decade ago. After the dried green beans are screened by density and color, they undergo four manual selections to remove defective beans, producing Golden Mandheling with dark green color and uniform bean appearance.

The renowned Golden Mandheling among Mandhelings is even more captivating. The true Golden Mandheling refers to products from PWN and BIWA. There are many stories about the golden Mandheling from these two companies that you can explore. Roughly speaking, "PWN" became synonymous with quality assurance, and it first held the "Golden Mandheling" trademark. The Japanese company BIWA had to register the "Gold Top Mandheling" trademark instead.

BIWA's Gold Top Mandheling consists of hand-picked and hand-processed beans from limited farms. After hand processing, the selected beans are processed using the semi-washed method, sun-dried, and hulled. They then undergo drying processes and two cleaning procedures and four manual selections, ensuring absolutely superior quality.

Conclusion

In short: FrontStreet Coffee is a coffee research hall that enjoys sharing coffee knowledge with everyone. We share without reservation just to let more friends fall in love with coffee. Moreover, we hold three coffee discount events every month because FrontStreet Coffee wants to let more friends drink the best coffee at the lowest prices. This has been FrontStreet Coffee's principle for the past 6 years!

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