It's been well over a month since I was able to last blog and the main reason for this is I had the wonderful pleasure of going off on honeymoon. My husband and I set off for Bali in Indonesia. As we all know, Indonesia is one of the coffee capitals of the world, most famous for their production of the rare Kopi Luwak coffee, the most expensive and supposedly best coffee in existence. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this coffee, there is an animal in Indonesia called a Luwak. This animal is a civet, which is somewhere between a mongoose and a small cat, but if you ask me they are just gosh darn cute. This civet actually eats the berries from the coffee bushes, but they don't digest the beans, so these are then released in their faeces. The droppings are then collected, cleaned to leave only the bean and then roasted. Apparently this process produces a smoother less bitter coffee. Unfortunately there is a dark side to this coffee trade, which I will elaborate on later in this blog.
Having all these thoughts of a country renowned for their coffee I wouldn't hear of it when my husband suggested we take some coffee with us to make in our portable Bodum plunger (yes we are coffee fanatics). What craziness to take coffee back to the place it comes from. I unfortunately was not entirely accurate in my assumption.
When we arrived in Bali we stayed one night in a hotel in Kuta, close to the airport. We were due to leave the very next day for the small Gili islands off the coast of Bali. After 18 hours of flying, no sleep and a full day later we were somewhat dazed as we stumbled out into the humid air and chaos of the Kuta streets. There were several small supermarkets along our hotel's road and we popped into one hoping to gather the few supplies we thought we would need; water, gum and most importantly coffee. To my great dismay stacked on the shelves were not row upon row of delicious Indonesian, rich coffee beans, but instead rather cheap and nasty instant coffee. I couldn't believe it, not a proper filter coffee anywhere. Of course my husband revelled in this fact having had to deal with my snarky comments about taking coffee to the country that makes the best in the world. And so the next morning we set off to Gili Meno, coffee-less.
Even though I knew Gili Meno was a small island I was still hopeful that perhaps we would find proper coffee, a hidden gem in a remote place. But this was definitely more than wishful thinking. The first place we stayed was a private villa on the beach. We were looked after by a Balinese family that stayed on the property and would prepare us breakfast and clean. My first taste of coffee in Bali was certainly not a pleasant experience. The darling chap had prepared us some indistinguishable brew. It was thick and almost sweet, with a flat flavour that had none of the notes that I am used to when tasting coffee. If someone had just given it to me randomly and not told me it was coffee, I don't believe that would have been my first guess. We were rained out, in the way only a tropical storm can do, for the first two days and having a nice cup of coffee while we were stuck in doors would have been divine, but I was avoiding the wretched Bali brew as much as I could. On our third day on the island we moved to a gorgeous hotel. It was amazing, and after a divine, romantic dinner on the beach, the next morning sitting at breakfast I was certain I would be served a quality cup of coffee. But alas it was not to be. Almost certainly the coffee was instant, it had a strange artificial taste. And so my quest to drink an excellent cup of coffee in Indonesia continued.
On our return to the main island of Bali, after a slight mix up with our accommodation, we found ourselves in a 2 bedroom villa with 10m swimming pool right in the heart of Seminyak. After a stroll down our quiet road we found a quaint Italian coffee shop and to my great relief after having been deprived of good coffee for 5 days I was delighted to see an espresso machine and the promise of Illy coffee. It was good to once again taste what my taste buds recognised as coffee, but unfortunately for me this coffee experience also didn't end well as I landed up getting sick from it. This put me off trying anything coffee related for a few days and when I finally mustered up the courage to have coffee again I really wish I hadn't. The coffee we received at this villa was accurately described by my husband as mud! The taste is so unpleasant I'm really not sure how the Balinese drink the stuff.
Being thoroughly unimpressed by the coffee we had so far sampled in Bali we made a mission to an extravagantly expensive super market down the road from our hotel. And there sitting on the shelf, costing double what we pay at home, was beautifully packaged Indonesian coffee. Of course at this point we were fairly desperate for decent coffee so we simply closed our eyes, ignored our budget and purchased the expensive grind. I'm so glad we did, because my faith in Indonesian coffee was restored. This coffee was excellent, it had a wonderful rich flavour, without any bitterness. Finally we had found great coffee in Bali!
On our way to Ubud, which was our next location on our journey, we stopped off at a coffee plantation. In part we were still holding onto hope of some good Balinese coffee and in part we just had time to kill before we were able to book into our next accommodation. I did however thoroughly enjoy our visit there, it was an interesting experience where I saw both coffee trees and cocoa trees for the first time in the flesh. We were taken around the plantation, which was actually more an education centre and home of the owner of the coffee plantation, by a sweet natured, knowledgeable girl. She informed us that the actual plantation was somewhere up in the mountains. We were shown the process of what the coffee beans look like all wrapped in the civet's excrement (they look like chocolate logs) and the way they traditionally roast coffee. We saw the civets in their cages and although these ones were only two in a large cage I knew this was really just them on display and the ones kept for commercial use were not given such 'luxury'. Originally when we were planning our itinerary I had been unsure of whether I wished to go to a plantation having heard of the cruelty inflicted on the civets. I changed my mind only from an educational perspective. These civets were definitely not in the horrendous conditions I had heard of, but they were in cages and for a wild animal that is bad enough. I also noticed some had become scraggy and lost their hair which we were told was from old age, but actually this is a direct result of being force fed copious amounts of coffee. There was actually a menagerie of animals besides the civet, multiple birds, monkeys and other small mammals and we were informed the owner loves animals, which to me is counter-intuitive, because if you really love animals you wouldn't subject wild ones to cages.
After our tour around the facility we were able to taste some of their products. Their tea variety was delicious and we were also able to taste pure cocoa in water which was so chocolatey without any of the sweetness we are used to. They had some instant coffee as well that comes already packed with powdered milk and sugar. That basically just tasted like sugary, artificial milk and was therefore not very appealing to us. The black coffee we tried was okay, but it has quite a smoky flavour because of the traditional way they roast, so it's certainly not the type of coffee I'd find myself drinking daily. You have to pay extra to try the Kopi Luwak coffee. I wasn't interested as I had already heard that the ways in which they use the animals to produce the coffee is incredibly cruel. If you are interested to find out more about Kopi Luwak please read this article:
Once we were done with our tasting we bought a few small samples to take back home, some flower tea and Bali coffee (not Kopi Luwak). We wanted to be able to share the taste of Bali coffee with those back home.
Once we had returned home, we were able to convince our family to brew some of the coffee we had returned with. Soon the familiar smell of mud coffee brewing filled my nostrils and I felt slightly ill. Whilst in Bali I had started to become use to the smell and taste of their coffee, but upon returning home I realised how much I distinctly disliked it. We all sat drinking our coffee, my parents trying to be polite and not say that they weren't enjoying the brew. Eventually I couldn't handle drinking anymore and my parents were released from the hold that good manners had on them. We all decided that the coffee was definitely not to our taste and my mom remarked how it reminded her of how the old people used to drink it on the "plaas", which made sense seeming they would have brewed it in a similar manner. Needless to say the coffee we brought back with us has since remained untouched and I think it unlikely that we'll ever give it another chance. Had it not been for that one small packet of Indonesian coffee we found I would have written Indonesian coffee off as awful. Bali coffee is however never going to rate highly for me. Of course the moral of the story here is to never to leave home without your favourite grind. Just for in case...
