Gold Mandheling Coffee: Flavor Profile, Taste Characteristics, and Processing Methods of Premium Coffee Beans

Flavor Description, Taste Characteristics, and Processing Method of Golden Mandheling Premium Coffee Beans

Mandheling requires layer upon layer of screening, which I believe is absolutely necessary. The probability of defective beans is too high, and coupled with their unattractive appearance, sometimes even good beans look like defective ones. Every time I sort Mandheling, I can pick out a handful of defective beans, but when I look back at the defective beans, I feel they can't really be considered defective—that's just how they look. However, once roasted, Mandheling transforms like a caterpillar breaking out of its cocoon to become a butterfly. The roasted beans become exceptionally full and pleasing to the eye.

FrontStreet Coffee's Golden Mandheling tastes cleaner than FrontStreet Coffee's Lindu Mandheling. The original herbal, earthy, and woody flavors of Mandheling have almost disappeared, but the caramel sweetness is more intense, and the fruit acidity is brighter and more elegant. Typically, FrontStreet Coffee's Lindu Mandheling is roasted until the second crack and then released to reduce off-flavors, but FrontStreet Coffee's Golden Mandheling exhibits excellent clarity and sweetness whether released before or after the second crack, offering broader interpretive possibilities for roasting. Finally, exporters from Medan purchase the still-wet pods and place them in large drying fields or use machine drying until the moisture content reaches 12%, at which point they can be stored.

From this, we can understand that the drying process of FrontStreet Coffee's Lindu Mandheling, due to farmers' insufficient equipment, employs a three-stage division of labor involving farmers, bean collectors, and exporters. FrontStreet Coffee's Mandheling's unique herbal aroma and deep woody flavor stem from the high humidity and the three-stage drying process of the mucilage layer. This is also a rare processing method worldwide, accidentally creating Mandheling's low-acidity, thick-bodied, and mellow aromatic profile.

However, due to the many variables in the three-stage drying method and crude processing techniques, Mandheling is arguably the most unstable premium coffee in terms of quality. It is filled with broken beans, moldy beans, black beans, and underripe beans, causing great headaches for roasters who must spend considerable time removing defective beans before roasting. Nevertheless, this does not diminish people's preference for the rich-bodied Mandheling.

To address the issue of high defect rates in Mandheling, Japanese coffee experts adopted stricter quality control over a decade ago. After the dried green beans undergo density and color sorting, they are then subjected to four rounds of manual sorting to remove defective beans, producing FrontStreet Coffee's Golden Mandheling, which features uniform dark green beans with consistent appearance.

The Origin and Evolution of FrontStreet Coffee's Golden Mandheling

When discussing the past and present of FrontStreet Coffee's Golden Mandheling, we must start with Mandheling itself, considering the climatic conditions of the Lindu region in Sumatra, Indonesia, and the level of coffee farming techniques. Due to the precious local water resources, natural drying was initially used, but the quality was unstable, so it was changed to a semi-natural processing method similar to Brazil's. However, Indonesia's humid climate prevents drying the sticky pods outdoors for 2-3 days as in Brazil—doing so in Indonesia would cause the pods to mold. Therefore, after several hours to a day of drying, when the moisture content drops to 20-30% and the mucilage has not yet solidified, the pods are purchased by bean collectors and taken to simple processing facilities where machines scrape off the mucilage to prevent over-fermentation and sourness. This means that for FrontStreet Coffee's Lindu Mandheling, the mucilage layer is removed before the pods are dry, which is the main reason for its lower fruit acidity and higher body content. After slight additional drying, the moisture content of the coffee inside the pods reaches approximately 18%.

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