How We Found Blush

A 50cc scooter, 600 miles across Flores, and a coffee we couldn’t forget.

Some coffees you go looking for. Others you find because one person introduces you to another, who introduces you to someone else. That’s how I found Monika.

While traveling through Flores, Indonesia, I kept asking people about coffee: Who grows something exceptional? Who is doing things differently? Who should I meet? Through a series of introductions from people on the island, I was eventually connected with Monika, a coffee farmer I had never met. We started texting over WhatsApp in Bahasa Indonesia. Then I got on my 50cc scooter.

By the time the journey was over, I would ride roughly 600 miles across Flores, visiting farms and searching for coffees that could show a different side of Indonesia. Monika was one of the people I found along the way.

Coffee first.

When I arrived, Monika did what people so often do in Indonesia when you enter their home. She served me something. Coffee, of course.

She brought out the green coffee she had grown and processed herself, and even before we ever roasted it, the care behind it was visible.

Monika was particularly proud that her coffee was washed several times.

For anyone unfamiliar with coffee processing, the way a coffee cherry is transformed into the green seed we eventually roast has an enormous influence on the final cup. Indonesia is famous for other processing traditions, particularly wet-hulling. Fully washed coffees are less characteristic of many Indonesian growing regions.

Monika had chosen a different approach. It was one of the first things that caught my attention. But coffee quickly gave way to something else: hospitality. That evening, we ate dinner at her daughter’s house. The family prepared three dishes for us, and we sat together talking late into the night.

Monika has four daughters, all entrepreneurs themselves. She is not only a farmer, but a matriarch and elder within her community.

I had arrived looking for coffee. Instead, I was being welcomed into a family.

The next morning, we walked.

Monika took me through her coffee farms.

We met some of the people who help care for the plants throughout the season—watching their health, pruning them, and tending the land.

Her approach to farming was remarkably simple. No synthetic pesticides. No added fertilizer. Organic material from the coffee cherries themselves is returned to the land. Then she showed me a much smaller section of the farm.

Red Bourbon.

That got my attention.

Coffee, like wine grapes or apples, comes in different varieties. Bourbon is one of coffee’s historically important varieties, known for producing coffees with remarkable sweetness and complexity under the right conditions.

Finding Red Bourbon here, on this small farm in Flores, was unexpected. And there wasn’t much of it.

Compared with Monika’s other coffee varieties, this was a tiny production. Red Bourbon can be less productive than many modern varieties, one reason coffees like this are not always the practical choice for a farmer whose livelihood depends on yield.

But sometimes the less practical coffee is the one worth paying attention to. I wanted to know what this one could become.

I took what I could carry.

There was, however, a logistical problem. I was traveling Flores on a 50cc scooter. So I packed as many kilos of coffee samples onto it as I reasonably could and continued down the road.

Monika and I stayed in touch.

Her coffees eventually made their way from her farms in Flores to us in the United States—and became customer favorites at Segara.

But that small lot of Red Bourbon stayed in my mind.

When we finally had the opportunity to explore it more closely, we found something remarkably expressive: a coffee with vivid fruit, a silky mouthfeel, and notes that reminded us unmistakably of watermelon and strawberry biscuit.

We called it Blush. Nothing was flavored. Nothing was added. That character was already inside the coffee.

 

This is what “single origin” means to us.

Technically, single origin tells you that a coffee comes from one particular origin rather than being blended from coffees of different origins.

But for Segara, it means something more tangible. It means knowing where a coffee came from. Knowing the variety growing there. Walking among the trees. Drinking coffee at the farmer’s table. Meeting the family behind it.

And sometimes, loading a few precious kilos onto a tiny scooter because you have a feeling you’ve found something worth bringing home.

Monika had never exported her coffee before we met. She was excited by the possibility that something she had grown in Flores could be enjoyed by people thousands of miles away in America.

Today, it is.

 

Blush is Monika’s Red Bourbon from Flores.

And I’m honored to share it.

 

— Esther
Founder, Segara Coffee