Colonial Contrasts: Java and Sumatra

Java’s role in coffee’s history is well-known, Sumatra’s much less so. One reason is that the coffee industry of the latter was developed by exploiting the fame of the former. At the end of the nineteenth century, it’s estimated that 90% of the coffee sold in the US under the name of Java was in fact of Sumatran origin.

Java’s fame rested upon its history as the first location where European colonial powers initiated coffee cultivation under their own rule, having previously been forced to purchase beans through the Ottoman controlled trade routes out of the Yemeni port of Mocha. The Dutch East India company introduced coffee to the island in 1896, and the first commercial shipments of coffee from Java to Amsterdam began in 1711. By 1726, 90% of the coffee for sale on the Amsterdam exchange came from the island. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the Caribbean (notably the Dutch colony of Surinam and then the French territory of Saint-Domingue) overtook Java, but the disruption of trade caused by the Haitian revolution and the American wars, enabled East Asia to regain this lead in the early 1800s. 

Mount Kerinci, Sumatra, Indonesia

It was at this point that coffee production began in earnest in Sumatra under the Dutch so-called ‘Cultivation System’, imposing a duty upon communities to devote a portion of their lands and labour to the production of commercial commodity crops. Government officials allocated responsibility for cultivation of around 650 coffee trees per household to each community, with the government then purchasing the year’s harvest for a fixed price (well below that on the open market) providing it was considered ‘up to standard’. These lots were amassed in ‘go-downs’ until ready to be transported to the ports of Padang and Benkoolen (now Benkulu) where the government auctioned it off for export, thereby raising revenues for the imperial administration. 

Phil Magowan (Exemplar) with Triyono of Koerintji Barokah Cooperative, Sumatra, and Professor Jonathan Morris (World of Coffee, Athens 2023)

Whereas much of the coffee produced in Java was grown on large scale plantations, often directly overseen by government officials, most of the ‘government’ coffee in Sumatra was grown by peasant communities in communal plots located in the forests surrounding their villages. This fundamental distinction would play a key part in the islands’ fortunes both during the colonial period itself, and thereafter. Simply put, despite both systems being exploitative, the lives of coffee growers in Sumatra were both less disrupted and better rewarded than those of the Javan plantation labourers. 

In addition, private estates operated by European settlers were also encouraged by the Sumatran administration, which granted them concessions of uncultivated land on long leases of 75 years. In order to clear and work the land, the owners imported indentured labourers from Java who were usually bound to the estate for three years. By the 1890s the ‘free’ coffee that came from these estates constituted around 20% of the island’s output. Private traders too were more prevalent in Sumatra, encouraging additional peasant production. Many of these traders had links to the US, helping explain why over three-quarters of the island’s production was eventually exported there. 

A further reason for the success of Sumatran coffee was the combination of its flavour and colour it presented, the latter often being used as an indicator of the former. According to Joseph Walsh, an American commentator writing in 1894: 

‘Sumatra forms nine-tenths of the coffee imported and sold in the United States under the head of Java, being preferred to the latter by the American dealers in general, on account of its usually dark-brown colour and distinctive “musty” flavour.’ 

These characteristics were usually ascribed to the Sumatran terroir - notably the rich volcanic soil - and high levels of rainfall in the western half of the island. A pamphlet issued to potential investors in a private concession offered for sale in the 1890s described how the nearby Kaba volcano:

“‘was in constant eruption. Every ten minutes a huge cloud of ashes and steam, appearing black and white in the sunlight, bursts out from the volcano and rises to an immense height with a sound like the firing of an enormous gun. The ashes form a canopy over the crater, gradually spreading and finally descending all over that country for miles around. This has been going on perennially perhaps for centuries past, so that the ground has all the requisites of splendid soil. ... If the weather has been still, the thick leaves of the coffee trees for miles around have a thin covering of ashes which do no harm to the plantation and are washed away by the rain.’”

The high levels of humidity, however, made it difficult to dry the beans to the levels usually achieved at other origins. Coffee was processed using the natural method, but according to Walsh a “drying house” was used, within which the cherries were ‘placed on hurdles about four feet from the floor, under which a slow wood-fire is kept up during the night; the roof is opened in the mornings and evenings to admit the air, the berries being frequently stirred meanwhile to prevent fermentation’. The origins of the ‘wet hulling’ process, already practiced at the end of the nineteenth century, likewise seem to lie in an attempt to shorten drying times by reducing the amount of fruit adhering to the beans. Also recorded in this period was the use of ‘kopi luwak’ by local communities who believed that the beans found in civet cat scat could be used to make a medicinal brew, even if for the most part they preferred to use coffee leaves (which of course were not subject to collection) to prepare a form of tea. 

The practice of amassing the beans in ‘go-downs’ prior to transport also made it likely that moisture levels would again increase. This facilitated the development of a rich, heavy body, combined with a bland, mellow taste compared to the grassy flavours of newly processed beans. The humid conditions in which the coffee was stored resulted in the discolouration or ‘browning’ of the beans. This came to be perceived in the American market as a positive indicator, resulting in a market for so-called Old Government Java that had been stored in warehouses open at the sides, not unlike the Indian practice of monsooning. Similar effects also occurred during shipping when the under-dried coffees were subject to storage in the sealed holds of sailing ships that could take several months to reach their destination. According to Walsh:

the demand for “Brown Java” coffee is but an American caprice, enhancing its commercial value from two to three cents per pound beyond its intrinsic worth; this caprice being also responsible for the immense amount of other so-called Java coffees that are annually sweated and coloured to imitate or counterfeit the naturally coloured and genuine kind.

At this point, of course, the majority of these coffees were actually from Sumatra – it was only in 1916 that a regulation was introduced under the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act specifying that only Arabica coffee grown on the island itself could be sold under the label Java. By then, however, according to Ukers, American buyers were already giving preference to Sumatran origins over Javan ones on the basis of the superior size of the bean and the depth of the body. 

For that matter the nature of the output from both islands had dramatically changed. The advent of coffee leaf rust had destroyed many of the original plantations with the result that annual production in Java fell from over 152 million pounds in the late 1870s to 31.5 million pounds in 1910, while Sumatran plummeted from 17.4 million pounds to under 1.5 million pounds in the same period. Thereafter production increased, but this was primarily as a result of replanting with Robusta (and on occasion Liberica). By 1920 Java was producing 59 million pounds of which only just over 2 million was Arabica, while Sumatra’s output was just over 38 million pounds, of which over 34 million was Robusta. 

The combination of the rise of Robusta and the Dutch government’s abandonment of the enforced Cultivation System in 1908 began a reversal of the balance of production between Java and Sumatra. Output fell in the former, continued to do so after Indonesian independence, and is now largely confined to a few, government-owned, plantations, inherited from the colonial administration. Conversely, in Sumatra, coffee growing has continued to provide communities with a cash crop that can be grown in conjunction with subsistence staples such as rice. Following independence, the government encouraged the migration of communities from western Java into southern Sumatra to take up coffee production there. This is why it is Sumatra that is now the dominant coffee producing island within the Indonesian archipelago.