TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Fifteen years after Arabica coffee was first planted in Java by the Dutch in 1696, Cianjur Regent Aria Wira Tanu, in West Java, sent around four quintals of coffee to Amsterdam, where the coffee broke record price at an auction. In 1726, 2,145 tons of coffee from Java flooded Europe, unseating Yemen’s Mocha coffee from its market domination. It was then that the coffee became known as Java coffee.
Twelve years earlier, King Louis XIV had asked Amsterdam Mayor Nicholas Witsen to send him seeds for planting Coffea arabica var. arabica, also known as Coffea arabica L. var. typical, from hereon referred to as the ‘Tipika’. The French king had heard that Javanese coffee was selling higher at auctions in Amsterdam and wanted it to be part of his collection at the Jardin des Plantes botanical garden in Paris.
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The coffee plant seeds that Nicholas Witsen sent him came from along the banks of the Ciliwung, such as Kampung Melayu and Meester Cornelis, the old name for Jatinegara, now part of Jakarta. The area became one of the first coffee regions in Java after the Dutch brought over seeds from Sri Lanka. In 1706, when he saw how coffee was flourishing in Java, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) sent coffee seeds from Ciliwung to a botanical garden in Amsterdam to be studied. As it turned out, the coffee was of good quality.
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A French naval officer then took some Java coffee seeds from the Jardin des Plantes to Martinique, a French colony in the Caribbean. In the early 1720s, the Dutch also shipped Javanese coffee seeds to Suriname, where they wanted to develop plantations because of the variety’s high value. Java coffee seeds spread from those two places to South and Central America.
According to Prawoto Indarto, who studies the history of coffee, Java coffee’s traces can still be found in South America. "Tipika is still found in their plantations," he said. Blue Mountain coffee planted in Jamaica and Geisha (or Gesha)-in reference to a coffee-producing hamlet in Ethiopia-in Panama are two examples.
Read the full article in this week's edition of Tempo English Magazine
