Sumatra Women's Harvest

When you think of the coffees that graced the menus of coffee shops of decades past, you may remember they came from places like Colombia, Brazil, or even Sumatra. This coffee was almost always roasted aggressively dark to hide defects, highlight boldness, copious body, and a more straightforward consumption of caffeine. Until the rise of “third wave” coffee, there were no questions of tasting notes or of a coffee’s story and we certainly didn’t ask questions about equity in the places where coffee is grown.

Being part of this newer school though, we care about all of those things and care about the intersection of people’s flavor preferences and knowing we are doing good for our producer partners at origin. Hence we’re happy to offer our newest women’s produced coffee, this Sumatra Women’s Harvest. This coffee comes from the northernmost reaches of the island in Aceh, from over 900 women based around the city of Takengon. The coffee is marketed by Ratu Ketiara Gayo, a new subunit of a larger coop called PT Ketiara which for two decades has done the work of uniting producers in this area. RKG offers resources to a younger cohort of coffee producers while holding close the lessons parent group PT Ketiara has learned over the years operating in the male-dominated coffee industry of Indonesia.