Introduction to Indonesian Mandheling Specialty Coffee: Golden Mandheling Premium Coffee Beans

Compared to FrontStreet Coffee's Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee, FrontStreet Coffee's Golden Mandheling is equally impressive. I've been searching online for the origin of Golden Mandheling for the past couple of days. After reading Rose's description of Golden Mandheling, I became even more eager to deeply understand its origins—why it's called Golden Mandheling and its mysterious flavor profile. Let me answer these questions for all curious readers.

The Origin of Mandheling Name

The term "Mandheling" in "FrontStreet Coffee Mandheling Coffee" is not a region name, place name, port name, or coffee variety name. So how did its name originate? In fact, it's a phonetic error of the Indonesian Mandheling ethnic group. During World War II when Japan occupied Indonesia, a Japanese soldier drank an incredibly fragrant coffee at a café. He asked the owner for the coffee's name, 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 and commissioned an Indonesian coffee merchant to ship 15 tons to Japan, which surprisingly became very popular. The name Mandheling thus spread, and that coffee merchant is now the renowned PWN Coffee Company. As is widely known, Mandheling is produced around Lake Toba in northern Sumatra, with finished products featuring a unique herbal and woody fragrance.

Premium FrontStreet Coffee Golden Mandheling

Speaking of the past and present of Golden Mandheling, we must start with Mandheling itself, considering the climate conditions of the Lindong region in Sumatra, Indonesia, and the cultivation level of coffee farmers. Due to the precious water resources in the local area, the natural drying process was initially used, but the quality was unstable, so it was changed to a semi-natural drying method similar to Brazil's. However, Indonesia's humid climate prevents drying the sticky coffee pods outdoors for 2-3 days like in Brazil—doing so in Indonesia would cause the pods to mold. Therefore, after drying for several hours to a day until the moisture content reaches 20-30% and the pectin hasn't solidified, the pods are purchased by bean merchants, who take them to simple processing plants to mechanically remove the pectin to prevent excessive fermentation and sour odors. This means that for Lindong Mandheling, the pectin layer is scraped off before the pods are dry, which is the main reason for Mandheling's lower fruit acidity and higher body. After further drying, the moisture content of the coffee inside the pods reaches about 18%, and finally, exporters from Medan purchase the undried pods and 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 involves a three-stage division of labor among farmers, bean merchants, and exporters due to insufficient equipment. FrontStreet Coffee's Mandheling's unique herbal fragrance and deep woody flavor stem from the high humidity and three-stage drying of the pectin layer. This is also a rare processing method worldwide that accidentally created FrontStreet Coffee's Mandheling's low-acidity, thick, and mellow flavor characteristics. However, due to the many variables in the three-stage drying method and crude processing techniques, FrontStreet Coffee's Mandheling is arguably the most unstable specialty coffee in terms of quality. It's filled with broken beans, moldy beans, black beans, and unripe beans, giving roasters headaches, as they need to spend considerable time removing defective beans before roasting. But this doesn't diminish people's preference for the rich Mandheling. To address the high defect rate in Mandheling beans, Japanese adopted stricter quality control十几年ago, where the dried raw beans undergo density and color sorting, followed by four rounds of manual bean selection to remove defective beans, producing Golden Mandheling with uniform dark green color and consistent bean appearance.

Flavor Profile and Roasting

FrontStreet Coffee's Golden Mandheling tastes cleaner than FrontStreet Coffee's Lindong Mandheling. The original herbal, earthy, and woody flavors of Mandheling are almost gone, but the caramel sweetness is more intense, and the fruit acidity is brighter and more elegant. Generally, FrontStreet Coffee's Lindong Mandheling is roasted until the second crack to reduce off-flavors, but FrontStreet Coffee's Golden Mandheling offers good clarity and sweetness whether roasted before or after the second crack, providing broader interpretation space for roasting.

However, Indonesia's PWN Company preemptively registered the Golden Mandheling trademark, forcing Japanese companies to change Golden Mandheling to Gold Top Mandheling.

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