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If you ask which coffee on Front Street's bean list has the highest body, we would definitely answer: Golden Mandheling coffee. This is a high-quality dark-roasted coffee bean from Sumatra, Indonesia. It not only has solid caramel, spice, and pine notes, but also a rich, full-bodied mouthfeel with a clear sweet aftertaste. It is the top choice for countless friends who love black coffee, especially office workers busy with work. To enjoy the deliciousness of Mandheling at their desks, they choose to have the coffee beans customized into individually packaged drip bags, which are convenient and time-saving.
What is "Golden Mandheling"?
During World War II, the battlefield spread from the European continent to Asia. Indonesia, then still a Dutch colony, was invaded by Japan in 1942 because the Netherlands declared war on Japan. Japanese troops landed on Sumatra in February 1942. The Japanese, who already loved drinking coffee at the time, felt the charm of Mandheling coffee processed with the wet-hulled method in northern Sumatra and have been loyal fans of Mandheling ever since.
Even the rumored origin of the name Mandheling is related to the Japanese, said to have come from a pronunciation misunderstanding. During World War II, a Japanese soldier happened to drink a cup of rich, aromatic coffee in a local café. The soldier was so amazed that he asked the owner the name of the coffee. Because of the language barrier, the owner mistakenly thought the soldier was asking about his ethnicity, so he answered, "Mandailing." After the war, the Japanese soldier entrusted an Indonesian broker to ship 15 tons of the "Mandheling coffee" he remembered to Japan, and it unexpectedly became very popular. It can be said that this broker made Mandheling, and Mandheling also made this broker the founder of what is now the renowned Pwani Coffee Company (PWN).
PWN's full name is "N.V. Pawani Medan company". This is a trading company mainly engaged in purchasing local high-quality lots of Mandheling green beans. Its coffee only produces specialty-grade Mandheling, and "Golden Mandheling" is its signature product. After the Japanese took a liking to Sumatra coffee at the time, they purchased it long term and gradually discovered that the quality of local beans was often uneven. So they paid more attention to Mandheling production and began setting strict standards and methods for screening defects, including bean density, size, shape, and color values. The resulting Mandheling needed one machine sorting plus four rounds of manual hand sorting to remove defects, ensuring that the Mandheling produced was complete, uniform, large, and bright, while also reducing Mandheling's earthy and grassy flavors. It is said that under the sun it shone golden, which is how it got the name "Golden Mandheling."
What makes Golden Mandheling coffee good?
The characteristic of Golden Mandheling coffee is that the green beans undergo multiple screenings, so the overall quality is very high, and the brewed coffee therefore shows quite good cleanliness. When purchasing, PWN only takes Mandheling green beans of 18 screen size or above, G1 grade with fewer than 3 defective beans in a 300g sample, which is the highest grade of Indonesian green beans. It is then strictly screened according to standards with one machine sorting plus three rounds of manual selection, comprehensively removing defective beans and ensuring that the color, shape, and size of the Mandheling coffee beans are uniform.
After Front Street brought in PWN's Golden Mandheling, we used a medium-dark roast, hoping to present Mandheling's classic roasty aroma. Front Street first conducted a cupping evaluation of the freshly roasted Golden Mandheling coffee. In the dry aroma stage, Golden Mandheling offers cedar wood, nuts, spices, and herbs. As hot water is poured in, there are notes of licorice and caramel. When drunk, it has flavors of dark chocolate, cacao, nuts, and spices. The overall cup is clean, with a clear sweet aftertaste and high body. It is not only suitable for extraction methods such as pour-over, French press, and siphon, but also, when made into drip bags, can still present the essence of Golden Mandheling.
Next, Front Street will demonstrate for everyone how to brew a cup of rich, full-bodied Golden Mandheling coffee at home:
Brewing a drip bag can be very simple. You only need to pour a certain amount of hot water into the coffee grounds, wait for the coffee liquid to drip through, and the entire extraction process is complete. The flavor of drip bag coffee is related to many factors, such as the coffee-to-water ratio, water temperature, pouring method, and so on. If you want to brew a cup of drip bag coffee with good flavor and mouthfeel, Front Street suggests paying extra attention to the following details during operation, which can make the coffee in your cup taste better.
First, we need to prepare sufficiently hot water, because only when the water temperature is high enough can more aromatic substances be released from the coffee grounds. When brewing pour-over coffee, Front Street suggests using a water temperature of 86–93°C. If the temperature is only around 80°C, the brewed coffee tends to be weak and tasteless, while boiling water easily extracts burnt bitter flavors. Therefore, Front Street will leave boiled water uncovered at room temperature for 1–2 minutes to let the water temperature drop slightly to around 90°C.
When brewing pour-over coffee, the coffee-to-water ratio is very important. If a cup uses a 1:12 coffee-to-water ratio, the coffee easily becomes too strong and only bitter. When using 1:18, there is too much water, making the coffee taste flat with insufficient aroma. Front Street suggests first brewing at 1:15: 10 grams of coffee grounds correspond to pouring 150 grams of hot water. The extracted flavor is more balanced, and the extraction is also more stable. If you do not have a scale, you only need to find a cup with markings.
Before brewing, first boil the water, tear open the sealed packaging, take out the coffee drip bag, and tear open the non-woven pocket along the dotted line on top. Then pull open the two ears, open the entire drip bag, and hang them on the edge of a cup or server.
First, pour in a small amount of hot water for the first stage to wet all the coffee grounds, and let it bloom for about 10–20 seconds to help release gas from the coffee grounds, with the aim of making the later extraction more stable. For the second stage, pour in a steady small stream until the liquid surface is nearly full, then wait for the coffee liquid to drop until it has all flowed through. Pour in the final stage of water until full, and wait until all the coffee liquid has dripped through, which ends the extraction.
Before drinking, Front Street will gently swirl the coffee liquid to even it out, then drink it directly to taste the pure flavor of black coffee. Everyone can add an appropriate amount of sugar or milk according to personal preference.
What should you pay attention to when buying drip bag coffee?
Although brewing a drip bag coffee packet is very simple, quite a few customers have still told Front Street that the coffee they brew is very weak and the aroma is not as rich as pour-over. Compared with pour-over, brewing a drip bag requires no complicated tools, and the pouring technique, time, and ratio do not need to be controlled as rigorously as with pour-over. You only need to ensure sufficiently hot water and a suitable ratio. But precisely because of the "casual" operation, the coffee flavor performance is often not as rich and varied as pour-over coffee. In addition, because the drip bag is ground in advance and placed in the packaging bag, the aroma is not as full as freshly ground coffee. If stored too long, more than a few months, it may also develop some woody flavors, so after purchase we need to enjoy it as soon as possible.
In order to preserve the coffee's original flavor as much as possible, the coffee grounds used in drip bag coffee are usually ground from freshly roasted coffee beans. The coffee beans shipped by Front Street are all freshly roasted within 5 days. If made into drip bag coffee, when we receive it, it is usually 4–5 days after roasting, just the right time to start brewing and tasting. Front Street suggests drinking it as soon as possible after receiving it; otherwise, prolonged storage can easily cause the aroma in the coffee to be lost. If you want to taste coffee with the fullest flavor, Front Street suggests buying whole beans and grinding and brewing fresh each time, for a better flavor layering.
The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.
