Timor Leste - Eratoi - Natural
TIMOR LESTE - ERATOI - NATURAL
COUNTRY
Timor-Leste is a small tropical island nation situated in South East Asia. It gained its independence on the 28th November 2002, making it the first new country of this millennium, ending four centuries of Portuguese colonisation and 25 years of Indonesian occupation. With the assistance of international aid, local NGOs and certain factions of the private sector, capacity building has been identified as an essential focus to facilitate the Timorese people in developing their country and establishing itself as its own autonomous state after years of unsettlement.
Out with the volatile oil and gas sector, agriculture is the mainstay economy of Timor-Leste. Coffee is the main cash crop and is also its largest exported good. Coffee plants were first brought to Timor-Leste in the early 19th century by the Portuguese and grown wild in the mountainous regions of the central highland districts, flourishing underneath the shade of their natural tree canopies. Well known to be organic by default, Timor-Leste is possibly the only country in the world that produces exclusively organically grown coffee.
THIS COFFEE
Located at an altitude of 1800 masl, the coffee of Eratoi grows in amongst the coffee forests surrounded by the imposing Ai-Samtuku shade trees. These trees provide the coffee with a good balance of sun and shade, which allows the coffee to grow and mature slowly, leading to increased sweetness when harvested and processed.
The group led by Simao Pedro de Deus, has steadily grown and now consists of 25 small smallholder farmers, all hailing from previous generations of coffee farmers. With a strong sense of unity, the farmers' shared goal is to produce high quality specialty coffee. Through this consolidated mindset, the Eratoi group continues to consistently produce delicious coffee year on year.
Even though the fully-washed process is the most common in Timor-Leste, our import partners have been experimenting with the farmers of Eratoi in processing natural coffee. With the skills gained from already producing high quality and well processed washed coffee, lead farmer Simao Pedro de Deus hopes to explore the opportunities of producing the same quality of natural processed coffee. In 2022 Simao tried processing a nano lot of natural coffee for the very first time, taking control of the drying himself and ensuring that only the ripest of red cherries were selected. As with their fully-washed coffee, the cherries are sifted to remove any that are overly small and then washed and floated to remove any defects. The cherries then undergo a 12 hour anaerobic fermentation, having yielded good results from experimenting the previous year. With this in mind, the cherries are then placed into sealed Ecotact bags overnight and the next morning, they are placed out to dry on raised drying beds. The drying of the coffee is carried out in 2 phases. The first phase sees the coffee cherries spread thinly and dried in the sun until the moisture is reduced from 68% to 25%. For the second phase the cherries are deeply layered for 15-20 days and are dried from 25% to 9.5% moisture. Once this optimum moisture level is achieved, the cherries are then rested for 6 weeks before the final hulling process takes place.
TASTES LIKE:
Wild Strawberry, Orange Juice, Guava