Flavor Profile and Characteristics of Golden Mandheling Coffee Beans

FrontStreet Coffee · Flavor Description and Characteristics of Golden Mandheling Coffee Beans

FrontStreet Coffee's Mandheling offers a vibrant, delicate acidity intertwined with the richest aroma, allowing you to effortlessly experience the lively elements within its gentle richness. Its extraordinary taste has captivated many enthusiasts.

In the 17th century, the Dutch first introduced Arabica seedlings to Ceylon (today's Sri Lanka) and Indonesia. In 1877, a massive catastrophe struck the Indonesian islands when coffee rust disease devastated nearly all coffee trees. People had to abandon the Arabica they had cultivated for years and introduced Robusta coffee trees from Africa, which possessed stronger disease resistance.

Today's Indonesia is a major coffee-producing country. Coffee is primarily grown in Java, Sumatra, and Sulawesi, with Robusta varieties accounting for 90% of total production. Sumatran Mandheling, however, is among the rare Arabica varieties. These trees are cultivated on mountain slopes between 750 and 1,500 meters above sea level. The mysterious and unique Sumatran variety endows Mandheling coffee with rich aroma, full-bodied texture, intense flavor, and slight notes of chocolate and syrup. Mandheling coffee is considered one of the world's most mellow coffees. When tasting FrontStreet Coffee's Mandheling, you can feel a distinct smoothness on your palate. It also has lower acidity, though this acidity is still clearly perceptible. The vibrant, delicate acidity mixed with the richest aroma allows you to easily appreciate the lively elements within its gentle richness. Additionally, this coffee possesses a subtle earthy fragrance, which some describe as an herbal plant aroma.

FrontStreet Coffee's Golden Mandheling

FrontStreet Coffee's Golden Mandheling tastes cleaner than FrontStreet Coffee's Lintong Mandheling. The original herbal, earthy, and woody notes of Mandheling are almost entirely gone, but the caramel sweetness is more intense, and the fruity acidity is brighter and more elegant. Typically, FrontStreet Coffee's Lintong Mandheling is roasted until the second crack before being removed to reduce impurities, but FrontStreet Coffee's Golden Mandheling achieves excellent clarity and sweetness whether removed before or after the second crack, offering broader roasting interpretation possibilities.

The story of FrontStreet Coffee's Golden Mandheling begins with Mandheling itself. Due to the climatic conditions in the Lintong region of Indonesia's Sumatra island and the level of coffee farming techniques, and because local water resources are precious, the initial processing method was natural drying. However, the quality was unstable, so they switched to a method similar to Brazil's pulped natural process. But Indonesia's humid climate prevents drying the sticky parchment outdoors for 2-3 days as in Brazil - doing so in Indonesia would cause the parchment to mold. Therefore, after drying for several hours to a day until the moisture content reaches 20-30%, before the mucilage has fully set, the parchment is purchased by bean merchants and taken to simple processing facilities where machines scrape off the mucilage to prevent excessive fermentation and sour odors.

This means that for FrontStreet Coffee's Lintong Mandheling, the mucilage layer is scraped off while the parchment is still not dry - this is the primary reason for Mandheling's lower fruit acidity and higher body. After slight additional drying, when the moisture content of the coffee inside the parchment reaches about 18%, it is finally purchased by exporters from Medan. The undried parchment is placed in large drying yards or machine-dried until the moisture content reaches 12% before being stored. From this, we can see that FrontStreet Coffee's Lintong Mandheling undergoes a three-stage drying process involving farmers, bean merchants, and exporters due to the farmers' limited equipment. The unique herbal aroma and deep woody notes of Mandheling originate from the high humidity and the three-stage drying process of the mucilage layer. This is also a rare processing method worldwide that accidentally created Mandheling's low-acidity, thick-bodied, and mellow flavor characteristics.

However, 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. Broken beans, moldy beans, black beans, and unripe beans are abundant, causing headaches for roasters who must spend considerable time removing defective beans before roasting. This hasn't diminished the world's preference for the rich Mandheling, though. To address the high defect rate in Mandheling, Japanese implemented stricter quality control over a decade ago. After the dried raw beans undergo density and color sorting, they go through four rounds of manual bean selection to remove defects, producing FrontStreet Coffee's Golden Mandheling with uniform dark green beans and consistent appearance.

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