Indonesian Coffee Finds Favour Among Britons

Since the first event in 2011, the number of participants and visitors to the London Coffee Festival (LCF) has continued to increase, with an estimated 35,000 people visiting the festival or nearly 9,000 people/day, the Economic Functionary of the Indonesian Embassy in London, Hastin Dumadi, told Antara London, Sunday.

According to Hastin Dumadi, there were 200 small to large companies participating in this festival, such as Starbucks, Illy, Lavazza, as well as small and medium-sized companies such as Altwien, Novell who sell robusta coffee from Sumatra, and Coffee Monger with arabica coffee originating from East Java.

In this year's festival, several other "roasters" companies, like Cafe Pod that sells coffee from the Lake Laut Tawar area, and Extract Coffee Roasters that imports coffee from various regions in Indonesia, Peros that buys coffee from the Sumatra region, and Matthew Algie that buys coffee from Sulawesi.

In addition to coffee exhibitions for robusta and arabica types, several companies also sell coffee drink processing machines as well as glasses and aprons for coffee baristas.

From the observations of the Economic Functionary of the Indonesian Embassy in London, Hastin Dumadi, on average, coffee roasting companies that sell Indonesian coffee at the exhibition were in the form of roasted beans, but some were also in the form of capsules to be put into the coffee processing machine as sold by CafePod.

Lara Hunter-Rodwell from Peros, which is part of the large coffee company Bewleys, said that the demand from buyers for coffee from Indonesia, such as from Sumatra, was also quite good and had continued to increase.

Ashley Quinn from Extract Coffee Roasters said the same thing as Lara, that the demand for coffee, especially arabica coffee from Indonesia, continues to increase, but his company sometimes has difficulties in obtaining a stable supply of coffee from Indonesia.

The same was also expressed by the Novell company, which has not sold coffee from Indonesia since the beginning of this year, because they have not received any supplies.

Meanwhile, Brooke and Tarek El Khazindar, owners of Coffee Mongers, who primarily sell arabica coffee under the name "Mercator - Java", said that with the increasing interest in drinking coffee by the British public, their company wanted to increase imports of coffee from Indonesia, which is considered to have a distinctive flavor.

In addition to coffee from Indonesia, several other coffees that were widely sold at the exhibition were coffees originating from Latin American countries, including Brazil, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and from Africa, including Kenya, Ethiopia, and Tanzania.

Coffee production in Indonesia does indeed fluctuate quite a bit. In 2014, Indonesia was the 4th largest coffee producing country in the world after Brazil, Vietnam, and Colombia.

On average, 31 percent of Indonesia's total coffee exports go to Europe. With the increasing demand for coffee worldwide, including from the UK, where there is a large population of British people compared to other European countries, Indonesian exporters still have many opportunities to export coffee to the UK, he said.

Indonesian companies can send product samples of their coffee to various coffee importing companies in the UK, information about which is easy to obtain because each company has a page or website.

Coffee exporters can also participate in this activity next year, which will be held in early April 2017.

Editor: Suryanto

http://www.antaranews.com/berita/554556/kopi-indonesia-digemari-warga-inggris