Old Style and New: Coffees of Java and Bali
Merapi volcano in Central Java, Indonesia.
Java and Bali are familiar names in the atlas of legend and imagination: Java mainly because of an historical association with coffee so powerful that it lent coffee one of its nicknames, and Bali for reasons that have little to do with coffee, but with the famous beauty of the island and its people and culture. Today, both islands produce coffees of charm and interest, and this month we report on a small but impressive selection.
To say Java has a long history in coffee would be an understatement. After the colonial Dutch established Arabica coffee as a money-making crop on Java around 1700, the island, together with Yemen, supplied all of the coffee consumed in the world for the next 30 years. Thereafter, Java had to share the world coffee stage with a succession of other coffee origins, but retained enough of its … Read more