Indonesia Java Ijen Coffee

An arabica from the Ijen highlands at the eastern end of Java, grown by smallholders and on old estates on the slopes below the Ijen volcano. Washed lots tend toward chocolate, nuts and warm spice with a baked-apple note, while naturals bring berry and citrus. Brewed on a pour-over at 93°C.

Origin & Story

Two Ijens, one mountain

The Ijen volcano stands at the eastern tip of Java, on the border between the Banyuwangi and Bondowoso regencies. Its crater holds a lake that the Global Volcanism Program calls the largest highly acidic crater lake in the world, and at night the crater floor glows blue. The glow is real and well documented. Sulfur-rich gases escape from cracks at temperatures of up to 600°C and ignite when they meet the air, sending flames as high as 5 meters, and some of the gas condenses into liquid sulfur that keeps burning as it runs downhill, according to National Geographic and Science Friday. The 600°C belongs to the gas as it leaves the ground. Sulfur catches fire in air at a few hundred degrees, well below that, so the gas ignites as soon as it vents. Miners cut the sulfur by hand and carry it out of the crater, and visitors are told to wear respiratory equipment because the air is toxic.

None of that is where the coffee grows. The farms are on the slopes and plateau below the crater, in the Ijen-Raung highlands of Bondowoso. A good deal of the coffee sold as Ijen has more to do with farm groups, mills and roasters than with the crater, and it is worth knowing which part of the story you are paying for.

Who grows it, and how high

Two kinds of farm share the plateau. Smallholders sell through farmer groups; one group near Ijen is about twenty farmers processing their coffee together. Alongside them are four large estates laid out in the Dutch colonial period, Blawan, Jampit, Pancoer and Kayumas, now managed by the state plantation company PTPN XII; Jampit dates its founding to 1900.

Altitude is where sellers disagree most. One Indonesian news report gives the Ijen-Raung highlands as 900 to 1,500 meters; an importer lists Blawan at the same band and Jampit at 1,100 to 1,600; a Bali roaster says 1,000 to 1,300. No single figure is right for the whole plateau, because it depends on the estate and the farm. The same news report describes temperatures of 15 to 25°C and about 1,500 millimeters of rain a year, with five to six dry months. Harvest runs from about May to September. The varieties named by sellers include Typica and the selections Lini S 288 and S 795, along with Cobra, and the name on the registered geographical indication is Java Ijen-Raung.

How Java became a word for coffee

Java's coffee story starts with the Dutch East India Company. Seedlings sent to Batavia in 1696 were lost to flooding, a second shipment in 1699 took hold, and the first commercial shipments reached Europe around 1711. Shipments from the island were large and steady enough that its name became attached to the drink itself. Accounts of why the nickname stuck differ in the details, so take the mechanism with some caution.

In the cup

The cup depends heavily on the process. Washed lots, which are fermented, rinsed and dried, are described as nutty and chocolatey: roasters report roasted almond, dark chocolate and red apple, or palm sugar, nuts and spice with a medium body, or cooked apple, cinnamon and green spices. Estate coffees from Jampit and Blawan are sold with chocolate, almond, vanilla and cinnamon among the notes. Naturals, dried inside the cherry, are more fruit-forward. Coffee Review gave a natural Mt. Ijen espresso 94 points and described dark chocolate, blackberry preserves, nutmeg, tangerine zest and cedar.

So chocolate and warm spice recur from lot to lot, and fruit is the variable. If you want the nuts and baked apple, look for washed on the bag. If you want berry and citrus, look for natural.

Brewing and buying

A V60 pour-over suits it: 93°C water, a medium-fine grind and 18 g of coffee to 300 g of water, finishing in about three minutes. If the cup tastes sour or thin, grind a little finer; if it turns bitter or dry, go a little coarser. Chocolate and spice coffees reward a paper filter, which keeps the finish clean.

Labels use several names for the same area, including Ijen, Java Ijen, Ijen-Raung and Mt. Ijen. Look for the regency, the farm group or estate, the process and the harvest year, and ask the roaster if any of them are missing. The volcano is the draw for travelers, but farm, process and roast shape the cup, so a bag that leans entirely on the crater is telling you very little about the coffee.

Reading the Flavor Profile

These values are comparative editorial positions within our own catalog, calibrated so entries can be ranked against each other. They are not laboratory measurements.