Flores is a small island (360 km from tip to tip) in the Indonesian archipelago around 200 nautical miles East of Bali. Flores was known as Pulau Nipa (Snake Island) before the Portuguese arrived and they renamed it Flores (Flower Island). A very long thin Mountainous land with incredibly diverse terrain, and numerous active and inactive volcanic peaks. The Bajawa Highlands are one of the most traditional areas of Flores. Bajawa is a small town nestled in the hills and is the centre for the Ngada people of this high, fertile plateau. The coffee is grown between 1150 and 1400 meters, which is actually quite respectable altitude for Indonesian coffee farming. This is not the first time I have cupped coffee from Flores, but this is quite different from the brighter, sweeter, cleaner Flores we have offered. That coffee is good in it's own right, but here we have a much more intense cup, something along the lines of a great, agressive Sumatra flavor profile. The reason is that this lot is traditional Indonesia process, not wet-processed. Ripe cherry is picked from the tree, pulped with a small hand-crank machine to remove the skin (but all the fruit stays on the green coffee, which is still inside it's parchment), and laid out to dry in the sun. If this drying is done on patios, it is a bit slower than "raised bed" or screen-drying, and the result is a much more rustic cup. The coffee is then collected and transported to the dry mill to be hulled out of parchment and graded. With a traditional Indonesia, this happens before the coffee has been fully dried down to 11% moisture. And they don't let the coffee "rest" in parchment that long ... it happens largely in the shipping container on the way over to the US! Hence the coffee has a dark, opal-jade color. Okay, all that backstory is fine, but what about the cup? You know right away from the dry fragrance this is an earthy, full-body, intense cup. There are woody notes in the aroma too, wet forest bark, cocoa-chocolate. In the cup there is a syrupy, heavy body, low acidity; a thick, tenor-to-bass range flavor profile. There's a dark cocoa powder flavor from start to finish. It's not that complex, and might strike those who like bright, clean coffee as "wrong." But for some this is the bullseye for deep, thick, intense flavor profiles.



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