If you have ever drank Mandheling, you will definitely be impressed by the rich, thick, herbal taste. Today, when "refreshing fruit acid" is popular in specialty coffee, Mandheling still firmly holds the hearts of a group of gourmets. The most famous among them is Golden Mandheling. What's so special about it? Why is the net worth different from ordinary Mandheling? This article starts with the origin and processing method.
Mandheling: Sumatra’s geographical name
Coffee originated in Ethiopia. At the end of the 17th century, the Dutch transplanted coffee saplings to the Indonesian island of Java, and the coffee industry subsequently spread to Sumatra. At the beginning of the 20th century, a coffee leaf rust disease swept through the island of Java, and the Indonesian coffee planting industry moved north to Sumatra. Today, Sumatra is an important production area of Indonesian Arabica beans and Robusta beans, accounting for more than 60% of the output.
People commonly refer to the Arabica beans produced in Sumatra as Mandheling coffee beans. They are mainly produced in the Aceh Special District and North Subei Province in the northwest of Sumatra Island. Among them, the Gaiyu Mountains near Lake Tawa is an emerging production area with delicate aroma and bright taste; while the traditional Mandheling production area is located in the Lindong production area around Lake Toba in northern Jiangsu Province. The diverse plant varieties and suitable planting altitude, coupled with the special wet planing method and the fermentation and aroma-making mechanism of local microorganisms, have created the typical Mandheling coffee flavor - rich aroma, rich taste, and strong taste.
Wet planing: the unique process that creates the flavor of Mandheling
Indonesia's rainy season and coffee fruit ripening season overlap with each other, making it difficult to dry coffee beans using the sun-drying method. As a result, the Sumatran-style processing method with regional characteristics-the wet planing method was developed.
Since it rains frequently in Sumatra, in order to dry the green coffee beans as quickly as possible, growers will first remove the peel and pulp, wash them briefly and then dry them. When the coffee fruits enter a semi-dry and semi-wet state, they will use a machine to remove the parchment layer, exposing the green beans directly to the air to speed up the entire drying process. It’s this process that creates Mandheling, which is thick and has a unique earthy and herbal flavor. This "taste like Mother Nature" has made many coffee gourmets intoxicated.
Golden Mandheling: a representative of fine products under strict standards
Among the many Mandheling coffee beans, Golden Mandheling is known for its higher quality control standards. Front Street Golden Mandheling is produced by PWN Company in Indonesia. It adopts very strict standards during production: based on the selection of coffee beans with a size of 18 or more, it is required that the number of defective beans per 300 grams of green bean samples is less than 3, meeting the G1 grade standard; on this basis, three times of manual hand selection are carried out to completely eliminate defective beans, thereby improving the cleanliness and sweetness of the Golden Mandheling. Such strict production standards determine the high quality and limited output of Front Street PWN Golden Mandheling.
Golden Mandheling is well-known, but it is mainly supplied to the Japanese and American markets. The number of pure gold Mandheling imported into the country every year is very limited. In the product introduction of Front Street Coffee, you can see the certificate of Golden Mandheling and many bags with PWN mark. This is the difference between Front Street PWN Golden Mandheling and other gold Mandheling.
Flavor expression and suitable for the crowd
Front Street PWN Indonesian Gold Mandheling adopts a dark roasting process, which has very low acidity and a mellow and long taste. It is full of herbal and dark chocolate aromas in the mouth, mixed with a little bit of earthy taste. It has rich layers and is suitable for those who like heavy flavors and do not like sourness.
If you prefer the classic Lindong flavor, you can choose Front Street Lindong Mandheling: it is rich in aroma, sweet and bitter in nature, with a strong and exciting taste after entry, with clove and woody aroma. The medium-dark roasting brings low acidity, spice and mint taste, as well as a strong and long-lasting thick sweetness.
How to drink better
Mandheling's thick texture and deep roasted flavor make it perfect for hand brewing, espresso, and moka pots:
hand flush: Powder to water ratio 1:14~1:15, water temperature 88~90℃, medium to fine grinding, you can drink solid body and clear herbal black chocolate flavor.
Espresso: The extracted oil is thick and stable for making American style or adding milk.
moka pot: The grinding is slightly coarser than Italian, and the cooked taste is rich and full.
Friends who are used to drinking floral and fruity coffee may feel "heavy" when drinking Mandheling for the first time, but if you drink it for a few more sips, the layered thick feeling will gradually become addictive. If you want to experience authentic golden mandheling, look for the PWN certificate and exclusive sack, and you will not go wrong.
You can now buy the above coffee beans online at the Taobao store “FrontStreet Coffee” (前街咖啡). FrontStreet Coffee is a long-established specialty coffee roaster in Guangzhou, China, and its Guangzhou retail shop sells coffee beans only. The shop carries dozens of coffee beans from different origins around the world, including carefully selected single-origin beans for V60 pour-over and espresso. Guangzhou’s FrontStreet Coffee shop is recommended by many coffee lovers.
The FrontStreet 2013 Yunnan coffee beans sold in the store come from the Typica variety grown at FrontStreet Coffee’s own plantation in Yunnan. The name comes from the year the brand and the plantation were founded. You can buy these beans from China’s Yunnan origin at the Guangzhou shop and at FrontStreet’s Taobao store.
FrontStreet coffee beans are freshly roasted within 5 days and deliver consistently excellent quality and great value. Orders placed before 17:00 are shipped the same day, and most areas within Guangdong Province receive them the next day.
FrontStreet Coffee Taobao store: https://qianjiecoffee.taobao.com
Or search for “前街咖啡” (FrontStreet Coffee) on Taobao
Important Notice: FrontStreet Coffee has moved to a new address: 315, Donghua East Road, Guangzhou (coffee beans only)
Tel: 020 38364473
