East Timor coffee to challenge world's best-known brews

East Timor coffee to challenge world's best-known brews

Tom Wright, Dow Jones, Dili

Try to find coffee from East Timor, barely three months old as a
nation, and you'll probably come up empty-handed.

While coffee from neighboring Indonesia is gaining
international recognition alongside time-tested Colombian and
Kenyan beans, East Timor isn't a name which would register with
most coffee lovers.

But a growing band of aficionados is starting to warm to the
taste of the coffee grown in the highlands of this tropical
southeast Asian country, and industry experts say East Timor
coffee has the potential to challenge the world's best-known
brews.

Starbucks Corp. already buys from East Timor farmers to make
its 'Cafe Verona' blend. The East Timor coffee, an earthy-tasting
organic arabica known locally as Hybrida da Timor, is mixed with
lighter Latin American beans to make the Seattle-based company's
popular expresso.

For East Timor, creating a cachet for its coffee is crucial to
alleviate poverty among its 800,000 people, about a quarter of
whom rely on the bean for a living.

At a time world coffee prices are near 30-year lows due to a
huge overhang in supply - with stockpiles even used for fuel in
some cases - carving out a niche market for East Timor coffee is
crucial for farmers to sell their output at a premium to the
market.

But most of East Timor's harvest this year, which will draw to
a close in a few weeks, will end up in anonymous foreign instant
coffee brands, raising little money for farmers.

East Timor's efforts to stand with the best coffees in the
world are blocked by widespread ignorance among farmers about how
to harvest, dry and process the bean, says Alistair Laird, an
adviser to Cooperative Cafe Timor, the nation's largest coffee
buyer.

"To reach the niche market, we've got to improve the
standard," he says.

CCT, a cooperative of 18,000 farmers sponsored by the U.S
Agency for International Development, hopes to sell just under
half of its 1,700 tons this year to Starbucks, Laird says. After
operating since the mid-1990s with the help of foreign experts,
the cooperative is starting to produce coffee of international
quality.

In a downtown Dili warehouse, East Timorese laborers working
for CCT are busy sorting through thousands of green coffee beans,
picking only the best to go into waiting containers for export.

The cooperative hopes to sell its coffee at a premium price of
up to US$1.40 per pound, compared to the September contract for
arabica on the New York Coffee Sugar & Cocoa Exchange, which was
trading Thursday at 46.70 cents/lb.

The remainder of East Timor's harvest, which is set to total
about 6,500 tons, a tiny amount on a global scale, won't be able
to command such a premium. Many farmers are still harvesting
green coffee beans in a way which destroys the potential of the
coffee, Laird says.

Even CCT has huge room to improve before it builds up brand
recognition with consumers for its coffee, rather than having the
coffee end up as a blend with other better-known names, he adds.

But such a goal isn't out of reach, experts say.

East Timor's highlands offer a perfect environment for growing
coffee, which the Portuguese imported here several decades ago.
Guerilla activity in the mountains during Indonesia's 24-year
occupation of the country actually added to the quality of coffee
by keeping modern pesticides and fertilizers off the crop.

In a recent study, the Specialty Coffee Association of Europe
found that about a third of East Timor's growing regions have the
potential to produce coffee which could compete with the best in
the world, given better training.

So watch out for East Timor coffee, which may be coming to
stores near you soon.