Sumatra Mandheling Earthy Coffee

Sumatra Mandheling is wet-hulled arabica from the highlands of northern Sumatra, sold under a trade name taken from the Mandailing people. The cup is heavy and low in acidity, with cedar, dark chocolate, tobacco and an earthy, herbal edge. Brewed in a French press at 92°C.

Origin & Story

A name, not a farm

Mandheling is a spelling of Mandailing, the name of a people from the Tapanuli highlands in the south of North Sumatra. The name passed to the region's arabica through the coffee trade, and it stuck. Today Mandheling on a bag means wet-hulled arabica from northern Sumatra in general, and it can include coffee from Aceh in the far north as well as from the Mandailing and Tapanuli districts. It does not name one village, estate or cooperative. If you want to know where a Mandheling came from, look for a second name on the bag, such as Lintong, the district southwest of Lake Toba, or Gayo, the highlands of Aceh.

How arabica got to northern Sumatra

The Dutch brought arabica to Java around the end of the seventeenth century, after a first shipment of seedlings failed in 1696 and a second, in 1699, took. Coffee came to the North Sumatra highlands much later: it was first grown near Lake Toba in 1888, and in the Gayo highlands of Aceh, near Lake Laut Tawar, in 1924.

In between, coffee leaf rust swept through Indonesia's arabica in the late nineteenth century; sources give dates from 1876 to the late 1880s. Planters turned to robusta, which reached smallholders around Kerinci in about 1915 and spread across southern Sumatra in the 1920s, and robusta still dominates. Arabica is a small share of Indonesia's coffee, somewhere between a tenth and a quarter depending on the year and the measure, and much of it comes from small farms in the north. After the rust many Dutch estates were abandoned, and smallholders grow most of Sumatra's arabica today.

Wet-hulling, the step that makes the taste

Most Sumatran arabica is processed by giling basah, which means wet grinding and is usually called wet-hulling in English. A farmer picks the cherry and removes the skin and fruit within a day or two, usually with a small machine at the farm or house. The sticky seeds sit for up to half a day or more in a sack or tank, are washed, and are dried for only a few hours. Then they go to a collector, still wet.

At the mill, machines strip off the parchment, the papery shell around each bean, while the coffee still holds roughly 30 to 50 percent moisture; sources disagree on the exact figure. In most coffee countries that step waits until the bean is dried to 10 to 12 percent. The bare green beans then dry on tarps for about two weeks until they reach 11 to 12 percent and can be exported.

The method grew out of the climate. Northern Sumatra is wet and often cloudy, drying coffee slowly in its parchment is hard there, and selling wet coffee to a collector lets a smallholder get paid sooner. Hulling early also leaves the beans a dark bluish green, and without its parchment the bean is exposed to the air and the ground while it dries. That is where Mandheling gets its heavy body, low acidity and the earthy, savory, herbal side that some people love and others call muddy. The same exposure is the method's risk: a lot dried carelessly can pick up dirt and other taints, which is why sorting matters so much here.

Grades and varieties

Export Mandheling is usually sold as Grade 1, the grade with the fewest defects, and good lots add TP, for triple-picked: the green beans are sorted by hand three times. Farmers grow a mix of varieties, among them Typica, Tim Tim and Ateng, and a single bag can hold several.

What it tastes like

Expect the body before anything else. Coffee Review called one Gayo Mandheling a classic of the style and described pipe tobacco and baking chocolate, with pralines and sandalwood. An older review of a Mandheling described sweet cedar, a little apricot and moist, leafy earth, and said dark chocolate came forward with milk. Importers describe the profile in similar terms: earthy, savory and herbal, with dark chocolate and nuts. Fruit and floral notes are faint if they are there at all. Lintong lots can lean brighter; one reviewed Lintong showed lemon and apple alongside the cedar.

Brewing it

A French press keeps the heavy body and the oils. Use water at 92°C, a medium-coarse grind and 20 g of coffee to 333 g of water, and steep for four minutes before you press. Slightly cooler water than usual keeps the earthy notes from turning harsh. If the cup tastes muddy, use a coarser grind and pour it off the grounds as soon as it is pressed; if you want a cleaner cup, a paper-filter pour-over takes out the silt and some of the body. It also takes milk well.

Reading the Flavor Profile

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