'Together with the plant varieties and the particular microbes that get into the beans and affect the fermentation, the wet hulling creates this unique flavor most often likened to the taste or aromatics of cured pipe tobacco.' Yet, instead of damaging coffee quality, Shirin says, the imperfections caused by wet hulling actually help enhance the flavor. Since the Sumatran cherries are much wetter when they are hulled, the beans take a bit of a beating in the process. The combination of the wet hulling, the local climate and plant varieties, and the microbes and microclimates there produces this insane coffee.' 'The process is done in a few other places now, but nowhere else produces the intense, cured tobacco note of the Sumatra coffee. If you chew on one, you could bite right through it.'Īs Shirin explains, wet hulling likely was born of necessity-a way to accelerate the drying process in Sumatra's hot, damp environment. Then, they hull it when it is wet-at about 40 percent moisture-so the coffee beans are very pliable. 'Everywhere else dries pulp parchment coffee completely, but in Sumatra, it gets skin-dried overnight to allow the largest amounts of excess moisture to drain off. 'The coffee farmers hull the coffee of its parchment skin when the coffee is still wet,' says coffee expert Shirin Moayaad. Earthen and syrupy with notes of tobacco and tropical fruit, Nespresso's Aceh-sourced Master Origin Indonesia Arabica owes its distinctive taste, in large part, to an unusual coffee processing technique called wet hulling.

Small farms in Aceh-the northernmost province on Indonesia's island of Sumatra-produce coffee unlike any other on the planet.

Sumatra coffee beans