ABOUT THIS COFFEE:
Sunda Badak is a name for the rhinoceros native to the island of Java, and Frinsa Collective gave it to their signature coffee from West Java. The Dutch planted their first coffee plantations here. The land is a chain of active and extinct volcanoes, part of the Ring of Fire, with a tropical monsoon climate, and at its heart is a high plateau that is home to the Sundanese people. In the east of the island, coffee grows mostly on estates owned by the government. Out west, small farmers grow it on their own land and bring it to mills and collection points. The high ground, the weather and coffee plants that have long adapted to both give this region the best coffee in Java and in much of Indonesia.
Most growers here take their coffee to a central mill run by Frinsa Collective, on the farm of Wildan Mustofa and his wife Atieq, who started growing coffee there around 2010. The farmers bring their coffee in still wet. Some bring it as wet parchment, beans that are washed but still inside their papery shell. Others bring it already wet-hulled, with that shell stripped off before the bean has dried. The mill finishes the drying and then dry mills the coffee, cleaning the beans and getting them ready to ship. Each day's coffee is kept separate and tasted on its own as a day lot, and the mill's quality checks pick out the day lots that taste the way coffee from these highlands should. Those lots are set aside for Sunda Badak, and the growers who brought them in are paid a quality premium.
