Kinnara - Washed Timor Leste Organic Sabelo Cafe Brisa Serena

• Grower - 11 smallholder farmers organized around Café Brisa Serena
• Region - Ducurai Village, Letefoho Sub-District, Ermera Municipality, Timor-Leste
• Process - Washed and dried on raised beds
• Variety - Timor Hybrid, Typica
• Elevation - 1300 - 1500 masl

Timor-Leste, or East Timor, takes up the eastern half of the greater Timor island, part of the Indonesian archipelago and not far from the northern coast of Australia. It is a young republic with a long and chaotic political history, having only achieved full independence in 2002, after almost 500 years of consecutive occupations by the Portuguese, the Dutch, and Indonesia.

The greater Timor island is sun-baked and humid along its coast, but the interior quickly rises to lush and rugged highlands, with sharp ridges and vibrant grass-covered slopes. The Ermera municipality is one of the island’s highest in elevation and includes its highest peak, Tatamailau. The villages in the mountain’s vicinity are where Café Brisa Serena (CBS), a social enterprise and exporter, has spent the last 10 years developing smallholder coffee value chains. 

This coffee is produced by 11 select farmers from the Ducurai village, whose farmer community group is called “Sabelo”, a local word for “slaughter farm”, a title retained from generations ago when this area was the center of the local cattle industry. Sabelo was first established in 2010. The Ducurai village is just north of Tatamailau’s peak and Sabelo is one group in a small portfolio we import each year from CBS, who began by training remote smallholders in farm management and processing, and who is now a highly capable exporter with some of the best smallholder traceability in the world. Each year we receive a spreadsheet with farmer names and farm data, as well as parchment prices paid. This harvest Sabelo group farmers received $3.25 per kilogram of dried parchment, which after final dry milling is roughly equivalent to $2.11 per pound of exportable green coffee. 

Processing

After fermenting in small containers, the coffee is dried on raised beds and constantly sorted for quality. Many of the current harvesting and processing standards come directly from CBS, who has helped establish specialty protocols and invested in improvements to processing equipment. The addition of drying structures, for example, has greatly improved farmers’ ability to consistently meet quality standards for moisture content and water activity. In addition to coffee, Ducurai farmers also manage crops of taro and cassava, as well as pigs, goats, fowl, and cows, and many also have personal compost programs in addition to being organic certified.