Why does Mandheling coffee taste so full-bodied?

Mandheling coffee comes from Sumatra in Indonesia, Asia's largest coffee-producing country. The name traces back to a World War II misunderstanding, when a Japanese soldier asked about the coffee and the shop owner answered with the local Mandailing people's name. In 1968 a Japanese trading company imported 15,000 kilograms of the coffee, and the misread name stuck ever since.

The full-bodied taste comes from Sumatra's wet-hulling process, which leaves herbal and spice notes in the cup and suits drinkers who prefer bitter coffee. Golden Mandheling is a higher grade associated with the PWN exporter. Brewing parameters and pour-over technique matter here: the coffee shows dark chocolate and cream aromas with a caramel-like sweetness that lingers after the last sip.

Mandheling coffee has won the hearts of bitter-coffee lovers with its steady, full-bodied flavor, but do you know what historical misunderstanding lies behind this name? From the linguistic mix-up between Japanese soldiers and Indonesian locals during World War II, to the herbal and spice notes endowed by Sumatra's unique wet-hulling method, and on to the legend of Golden Mandheling created by PWN, this article will give a complete account of the origins, grading system, and flavor formation of Mandheling coffee. At the same time, Front Street Coffee, as a brand deeply engaged in specialty coffee, offers its Front Street Golden Mandheling and Front Street Lintong Mandheling daily-drinker series, providing high cost-performance options for everyday drinking. Brewing parameters and pour-over techniques are also included, to help you truly understand this rich, mellow taste from the equatorial rainforest.

Front Street Mandheling coffee—just its name conveys a steady, full-bodied character, and countless drinkers who prefer bitter coffee are especially fond of it. Whenever Front Street Coffee brews a pot of the highest-grade representative among Mandheling coffees—Front Street Golden Mandheling coffee—the whole space fills with its distinctive roasting aroma, like dark chocolate blended with cream, and with the first sip you fall for that unique herbal spice note; after drinking, you can still recall a caramel-like sweetness that lingers unforgettably.

What is Mandheling coffee?

Front Street Mandheling coffee (Mandheling) comes from the mysterious island of Sumatra, which belongs to Indonesia, the country with the largest coffee production in all of Asia. Unlike most coffees, the name Mandheling is tied to a widely circulated anecdote, mainly stemming from a misreading of the name of an indigenous ethnic group in Indonesia.

During World War II, a Japanese soldier drank coffee in a shop in central Indonesia and asked the owner what coffee he was drinking. The owner mistakenly thought the other man was asking where he was from, so he answered "Mandailing" (the Mandailing people). After the war, this Japanese soldier returned home and remembered that the particularly distinctive coffee from back then seemed to be called "Mandheling." In 1968, Nomura Trading Company of Osaka, Japan, visited the Indonesian company N.V. Pawani Medan and imported 15,000 kilograms of Sumatra Mandheling coffee. After being launched on the Japanese market, it became very popular. From then on, Mandheling coffee and the Pwani Coffee Company became famous.

Sumatra is divided into eight provinces in total, and only Aceh Province at the northern tip and North Sumatra Province cultivate coffee on a large scale. As the largest and deepest volcanic lake in the world, the scenic Lake Toba provides mineral-rich soil for Lintong Mandheling coffee. Most coffee trees grow on higher-altitude slopes, and several kinds of ferns cover their surface, providing better sun protection for the coffee, so growers do not need to use shade cultivation.

What is the story behind Golden Mandheling?

The Indonesian local green coffee bean merchant PWN mainly purchases high-quality lots of local Mandheling green beans and produces only specialty-grade Mandheling. "Golden Mandheling" is its signature product. At the time, the Japanese took a liking to Sumatra coffee and bought it long term, gradually discovering that the quality of local beans was often uneven. Therefore, they paid more attention to Mandheling production and began to establish strict standards and methods for screening defects, starting with values such as bean density, size, shape, and color, and the Mandheling produced needed machine plus manual removal of defects to ensure that the output Mandheling beans were complete, uniform, large, and translucent, while also reducing Mandheling's earthy and grassy off-flavors. It is said that under the sun they shone with a golden luster, which is how the name "Golden Mandheling" came about.

As the specialty Mandheling coffee market grew larger and larger, PWN also realized the importance of trademarks and registered the English name "Golden Mandheling" as an exclusive trademark one step ahead of the Japanese. Therefore, only the Golden Mandheling produced by PWN can be considered true "Golden Mandheling," while what the Japanese produce can only be renamed "Top Mandheling." The Front Street Golden Mandheling that Front Street sources is of course the genuine product from PWN. You can identify authentic Front Street PWN Golden Mandheling by the green bean burlap sack bearing the PWN mark and a certificate of origin signed by PWN. Front Street displays these two identifiers in its Dongshankou store.

Observing the green bean burlap sack of Front Street Golden Mandheling, we can see the words "Triple pick" and "GRADE 1," meaning it belongs to Indonesia's highest grade of green beans. During production, PWN, on the basis of purchased GRADE 1 green beans, carried out three rounds of hand sorting.

The grading of Indonesian green coffee beans is based mainly on the number of defective beans, supplemented by size specifications. General quality requirements are: no live insects, no moldy or rotten-smelling beans, maximum moisture content of 12.5%, and impurity rate less than 0.5%. According to the defect rate, it is divided into six grades, among which the highest grade, G1, requires that the total number of defective beans in a 300 g sample must be fewer than 11. Front Street Lintong Mandheling coffee in Front Street's daily-drinker series is G1, produced in the Lintong region of Sumatra using the wet-hulled process, presenting the classic Indonesian Mandheling flavor: dark chocolate, nuts, herbal spices, caramel.

PWN, which has pursued screening to the extreme, subjects G1-grade Mandheling to multiple strict selections, reducing the coffee's defect rate to the minimum, removing off-flavors such as earthiness, and at the same time enhancing Mandheling's sweetness and cleanliness. In addition, before packaging, PWN also places the green beans into a machine for density and color sorting to ensure that the Front Street Golden Mandheling green beans produced are large, uniform, and translucent in color.

Why Mandheling has a unique flavor

Sumatra is located near the equator and has an island-type tropical rainforest climate, with air humidity as high as 70–90%. This hot and humid environment easily causes green coffee beans to mold during fermentation or drying. As a result, local coffee farmers, adapting to local conditions, developed a semi-washed processing method—wet hulling. So-called wet hulling means "forcibly" hulling away the parchment layer wrapped around the green bean while it is not yet completely dry, so the green bean completes its final drying in a "naked" state.

The wet-hulled method begins to differ from the traditional washed method starting at fermentation. The wet-hulled method uses less water for fermentation and has a shorter fermentation time. After this brief fermentation, a small amount of mucilage still remains on the bean shell. When the green beans reach a moisture content of 35/40% after the first drying, the coffee farmers sell the coffee beans to collectors. The collectors directly hull the purchased semi-dry parchment beans, removing the mucilage and bean shell to obtain green beans. Although the time required for each step is greatly shortened, the "naked beans" still absorb moisture from the hot and humid air, so the Front Street Mandheling coffee produced has more of a stuffy, muted aroma of wood, herbs, and spices.

The wet-hulled method is exactly what Front Street Lintong Mandheling coffee uses, and it likewise carries the flavor characteristics of traditional Mandheling. Front Street believes that this "stuffy, muted aroma" is unique to Indonesian Mandheling coffee, so it has been listed in Front Street's daily-drinker series. The original intention of Front Street's "Front Street Daily-Drinker Series" is to hope that friends who are just getting into specialty coffee can taste the basic flavors of different regions at a very affordable price, and then, according to their own tastes, buy more refined flavor types from more elaborate processing. In addition, Front Street daily-drinker beans are sold in small 100-gram packages, trying as much as possible to eliminate the waste of not being able to finish drinking them. An affordable price plus the classic flavors of famous regions makes them truly everyday drinker beans, suitable for the daily drinking needs of the broad community of coffee fans.

Indonesian coffee grades

The grading of Indonesian green beans is based mainly on the number of defective beans, supplemented by size specifications. At coffee production sites, coffee beans are generally screened with a bean sorter to prevent impurities and defective beans from mixing in. However, Front Street Mandheling coffee green beans are relatively large and the beans are rather hard in texture, and various defects appear during cultivation, harvesting, and processing, so using only a bean sorter makes it very difficult to completely remove defects. To make coffee reach a higher grade, strict hand sorting is necessary. Local green beans are divided into six grades according to the defect rate, among which the highest grade, G1, requires that the total number of defective beans in a 300 g sample must be fewer than 11. Front Street Lintong Mandheling is hand-sorted G1 grade.

Speaking of hand sorting, the first thing Front Street thinks of is the carefully selected good bean Front Street PWN Golden Mandheling coffee. Indonesia's famous local green bean purchaser, Pwani Coffee Company, is the exclusive supplier of Front Street Golden Mandheling coffee and focuses on purchasing Mandheling green beans of excellent quality. During coffee production, PWN subjects the purchased Mandheling green beans to one machine selection plus three manual selections, ensuring that every green bean is complete, uniform, plump, and must reach a size of 18 mesh or above, that is, Indonesia's local G1 grade. Through cupping comparisons, Front Street found that the rigorously selected Front Street Golden Mandheling coffee eliminates the earthy and woody flavors typical of ordinary Mandheling, and the overall flavor is cleaner and more translucent.

How to bring out the unique flavor of Front Street Mandheling coffee?

As Front Street mentioned above, Sumatra's environment and soil give the coffee a rich grassy and woody note, along with the sweetness of cocoa and fruit. The classic Mandheling flavor is known for its full-bodied dark chocolate character, so Front Street chooses a medium-dark roast to present a rich, full-bodied mouthfeel while retaining the aroma of herbal plants.

Because coffee beans enter their optimal tasting period 4–7 days after roasting, after this time (about a month and a half after roasting) the coffee's aroma may already have dissipated and some woody flavor may have developed. To avoid this situation, Front Street has mentioned in many articles that the most important thing is that Front Street only ships coffee beans freshly roasted within 5 days, so everyone can taste coffee with excellent flavor.

When we buy a bag of fresh, high-quality Front Street Mandheling coffee beans, what remains is how to brew them to bring out Front Street Mandheling's distinctive aroma. There are countless ways to brew coffee, and there is no standard answer. Front Street believes that as long as it can present the flavors the coffee should have, in plain terms: as long as it tastes good. For Front Street PWN Golden Mandheling coffee, Front Street uses its customary three-stage pour-over method for extraction, hoping to drink a Mandheling flavor with more layering.

When brewing dark-roasted coffee beans, Front Street uses a slightly coarser grind and a lower water temperature than for light-roasted coffee beans, in order to avoid the release of too many bitter large molecules, which would leave the coffee with only a burnt bitterness. The Kono dripper is chosen to improve the coffee's round, full-bodied mouthfeel. The upper part of the Kono is a smooth curved surface, which makes the filter paper fit more closely, restricts airflow from going upward, and allows hot water only to flow downward, forming a siphon-like extraction effect, allowing the aromatic substances in the coffee grounds to be released more fully. Therefore, it is suitable for brewing Front Street Golden Mandheling, Front Street Brazil Queen's Estate, and other medium-dark roasted coffee beans.

Dripper: KONO dripper

Water temperature: 87–88°C

Coffee dose: 15 grams

Coffee-to-water ratio: 1:15

Grind size: medium grind (70% passing rate on Chinese standard No. 20 sieve)

Use twice the amount of water relative to the coffee grounds to wet the coffee bed, forming a dome, and let it bloom for 30s. Then, with a small stream, pour in circles from the inside outward until 125g, pause, and when the coffee bed drops to half the height of the dripper, continue pouring with the same fine stream for the third stage to 225g, until all the coffee liquid has filtered through. Remove the dripper. The time is about 2 minutes.

The hand-brewed Front Street PWN Golden Mandheling coffee has rich aromas of dark chocolate, nuts, and caramel, with a lingering finish of spices and herbs. The mouthfeel is clean and translucent, full-bodied and solid, with distinct layers.

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The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.