Ermera | Washed | Timor-Leste

Ok wow, this project is finally ready to launch! It’s been a long time coming…

So this coffee is the literal embodiment of everything we stand for. It’s a regional smallholder lot, comprised of parchment purchased by Raw Material’s team on the ground in Timor, pre-financed by us (with help from Algrano). What’s really special about it is that it represents the early stages of meaningful positive change for the community of growers behind it…

Ermera is Timor-Leste’s main coffee-growing region, and coffee is the country’s second-largest export after oil, but in this region nearly 60% of households live below the poverty line. Decades of little to no investment in coffee infrastructure and replanting schemes have led us here.

Raw Material are working to change this, buying cherries and parchment, then reinvesting directly into the community. That reinvestment has already created the means to process some brilliant coffees, but growth has been limited by capital. In a country where rural incomes remain extremely low, and building materials like bamboo can be sourced locally, relatively small investments can create substantial infrastructure improvements, which in turn increase revenues.

Basically, we paid for this coffee about a year before it shipped. That allowed Raw Material to purchase a load of additional parchment from smallholders who didn't have access to washing stations, with the profits being reinvested into building more washing stations and planting higher-yielding coffee trees.

It’s so fucking sweet.

Raw Material Timor-Leste: The Project

Raw Material have been working in Timor-Leste since 2018, building washing stations, investing in processing infrastructure, and creating routes to market for producers who would otherwise be isolated from speciality supply chains.The idea is pretty simple: buy coffee in a way that supports long-term development, then reinvest profits into projects that improve quality, yields, and livelihoods over time.

One of the biggest challenges here is geography. Coffee is grown across remote mountain communities, many of them hours from the nearest processing facility. Washing stations can dramatically improve quality and consistency, but building them takes time and money. Until they arrive, programmes like this provide an outlet for home-processed coffees and allow more communities to benefit from speciality demand.

Beyond processing, Raw Material are also supporting the 11 Million Trees campaign, one of the largest coffee replanting efforts in the country's history. Much of Timor's coffee is old, unproductive, and increasingly vulnerable to disease. Replacing it won't happen overnight, but it has the potential to improve yields, increase incomes, and strengthen the long-term future of Timorese coffee.

That's the bit that gets us excited. It's easy to talk about impact in coffee; it's much harder to point at actual washing stations, actual trees in the ground, and actual producers receiving better prices.

Big shouts to Matt and Ameta out there. They're doing heaps, check out all the lovely videos.

The Coffee

This washed lot is made up of Híbrido de Timor, Moka and Typica, grown by smallholders across Ermera. Rather than buying cherry directly, Raw Material purchased parchment from producers with limited access to milling facilities, handling the logistics of collection and transport.

The coffee was then milled, sorted and blended in Railaco, with quality control overseen by Raw Material's team. The result is a regional lot that brings together coffee from hundreds of small farms to produce a cup profile that is distinctly Timorese; big-bodied, sticky sweet, with heaps of character.

Timor-Leste

Sorry, where is that now? If you wanted to play pin the tail on the origin, most of us would be wayyy off.

Timor-Leste (East Timor) seems to be one of the most obscure regions we buy from. It’s out there in that coffees from there aren’t that common in our hemisphere, and in that it’s a country most people know nothing about. All that being said, Timor’s significance in the story of coffee cannot be overstated; it may well hold the answer to arabica’s climate change vulnerability. This is a mad interesting origin, so let us tell you why it’s become a significant part of our buying strategy.

It’s at the bottom of Indonesia btw, equidistant between Bali and Darwin.

So why buy from Timor-Leste?

Obviously because the island produces good coffee.

But why Timor over other regions? The answer can be split into 3 main points:

Impact, Genetics, and Profile.

Impact

Timor-Leste is quite a young country, and its recent history has been rocky to say the least. This country has been colonised and dicked over about as much as any you can find.

Like most of the Indonesian archipelago, the island was competed for by colonial powers throughout the 16th century. Eventually, the Portuguese claimed the east of the island while the Dutch VOC retained the rest - hence Timor and Timor-Leste. For centuries the Portuguese enforced forms of extractive control on its Melanesian and Austronesian peoples, stripping the island of sandalwood resources and planting coffee in its place… Standard.

It became a key battleground in WW2 because of its position between Australia and Southeast Asia. Both the Allies and the Japanese established themselves on the island, fighting over it for 3 years. The war left around 15% of the island’s population dead, and most of its basic infrastructure in ruins before returning it to Portuguese control.

Then, woohoo! Timor-Leste gains independence in 1975!.. Only to be invaded by Indonesia the following week and utterly rinsed for another 24 years. Under the standard Cold War anti-commie pretext, Indonesia annexed it, brutally suppressed resistance, and strengthened its claim to the oil and gas reserves of the Timor Sea.

Over the course of the occupation, an estimated 100,000–200,000 Timorese died through conflict, famine, and disease. Hundreds of thousands more would be displaced by the violence.

Occupation finally ends in 1999, when a UN referendum votes overwhelmingly for independence. Following the referendum, Indonesian actors embarked on a scorched-earth campaign. With the support of military figures, militias burned 70-80% of the country’s buildings, displacing roughly a third of its population.

Since independence, TL has made the most of the regained sovereignty over its oil reserves. Bringing it up from one of the poorest countries in the world to a medium GDP per capita. The reality here is far different from the paper. A large proportion of its revenues have been reinvested in petroleum projects with dwindling reserves, and long-running border disputes make further expansion unlikely.

So the country became wealthy enough not to attract attention from global aid agencies, but little of this wealth was invested in infrastructure on land. Today it’s left with an incredibly poor rural population, growing coffee without the means to improve quality and efficiency. Its terroir, geolocation, and climate mean it’s perfectly positioned to boom as a speciality coffee producer; it just requires support and capital to get there.

This is a nation with a rural population that could be transformed by increasing speciality-grade coffee exports. One dollar above the market rate here is likely to have a much higher impact than a dollar spent in any coffee region outside of Africa. Investing in coffee infrastructure through washing stations and replanting schemes would likely change hundreds of thousands of lives within a decade.

Genetics

Ok, wow, so Timor is one of these crazy biological stories where plants do their thing and save the world.

So Arabica is tasty but really vulnerable, Robusta is strong but nasty (usually, there are some nice ones out there). Arabica has 44 chromosomes, and Robusta only 22… so despite their similarities, they are totally different species rather than distant cousins. Somehow, here in the 1920s, plants were able to cross.

It’s actually not known how it occurred, but cross-pollination of plants in close proximity would have been the final step. It’s always these remote island nations where the interesting genetic shifts occur, and more often than not, it's the forgotten regions without serious infrastructure that produce them.

The Indonesian archipelago was one of the first places outside of Africa to be planted with coffee, and its many islands and remote mountain communities have made for little unchecked pockets of natural selection and mutation. The chances are, whichever farmer first created this hybrid, didn’t even know what varieties they were cultivating side by side.

The result is Híbrido de Timor, the single most important source of disease resistance in Arabica breeding. In a world with changing climates, emerging diseases, and general insecurity surrounding fertility, pesticide use, and yield expectations, this hybrid offers an island of hope in a puddle of piss.

All of these varieties trace at least part of their ancestry back to this line:

• Castillo

• Catimor

• Híbrido de Timor

• Centroamericano

• Sarchimor

And there are so many more. These are great coffees, they offer producers reliable yield and quality at mid-level elevations, and they provide us with 85%+ scoring coffees that can be sustainably produced. Now consider that over 80% of the coffee grown in Timor-Leste contains these genetics, every year this origin is rolling the dice and creating new roads out of the monoculture arabica bottleneck.

These coffees are the future, investing in the communities that cultivate them can only help their development. It means our grandkids can drink nice coffee, probs.

Profile

The flavour profiles found in the Indonesian archipelago are totally wild. They tend to have big body, or at least create the perception of it, and out-there sticky sweetness coupled with aromatic savoury backnotes. There are so many varieties down there, and so many of these smallholder lots we see are mixed, so it’s hard to say exactly where the profiles come from. What it is safe to say is that these coffees are not nearly as popular in the UK speciality market as they could be.

The whole region benefits from rich volcanic soils, high rainfall, and frequent cloud cover. These factors provide the perfect environment for consistent growth and slow ripening. Add to this extended sugar development, local processing styles that favour body over brightness, and you end up with coffees that excite the speciality crowd without alienating the less involved.

Timorese coffees, in particular, tend to exhibit this big body and complex sweetness. The genetics are mad. Add in a heavily forested landscape, frequent haze, and a relatively cool growing environment, and you have a near-perfect recipe for a rounded, approachable cup.

When people talk about approachable coffee, they almost always mean Brazil pulped naturals... but I shit you not, we had garden centres selling Timor-Leste single origins for years, and nobody batted an eyelid.

These coffees can compete with South and Central Americans for house coffee flavour profiles, but often offer a better value proposition to the communities that produce them. We’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s possible with the cup scores; investing in this origin will inevitably create more bangers.