Aceh (Sumatra)

A province, a highland and a registered name

Three different things are called by nearly the same name. Aceh is a province of Indonesia. The Gayo Highland is the mountainous middle of that province. Kopi Arabika Gayo is a registered geographical indication, and it is the only one of the three with rules attached. Coffee can come from Aceh, or from the Gayo Highland, without being entitled to the registered name.

The indication was applied for by a producers' body, the Gayo coffee protection society known by its Indonesian initials MPKG, which its own application says was set up in 2009 with the backing of the three district governments. Indonesia granted the indication on 28 April 2010. The society applied to the European Union on 26 January 2016, the application was published for opposition on 1 November 2016, none was received, and the name was entered in the register by a regulation of 15 May 2017.

Three districts and a band of altitude

The area is defined twice over: by administration and by height. It is the districts of Aceh Tengah, Bener Meriah and Gayo Lues, and within them only land between 900 and 1,700 metres above sea level. The society's fuller specification adds that most arabica varieties are planted between 1,000 and 1,400 metres, and that the highland as a whole runs from about 100 to 3,200 metres, so the band is a selection from the landscape and not a description of it.

Growing is not the only step tied to the area. Pulping, fermenting, washing, drying, hulling, storing, sorting, grading and bagging must all take place inside it. Roasting and grinding may happen anywhere, provided the beans came from the area. Bagging is kept inside it, the published document says, to protect quality and make each lot traceable.

Five varieties by name

The registration names the plants. It says about twenty varieties are grown traditionally in the highland, and admits five to the indication: Borbor, Timtim, Ateng Jaluk, S 795 and P-88, alone or mixed. The specification lets the society revise the list with the national coffee and cocoa research institute, the local agriculture service and a university agriculture faculty.

This list does not match, name for name, the cultivars a 2025 genetic study found most planted in the same districts, which the Indonesia entry describes. CoffeeHQ has read nothing that reconciles the two lists and does not attempt it. A registration records the names that were applied for in 2016; it is not a survey of what is in the fields.

Wet hulling, written down as a condition

Most accounts treat wet hulling as a habit of Sumatran farmers. Here it is a legal condition: the indication covers only beans obtained by it. The registered sequence is hand-picking, pulping on the day of harvest, fermenting, washing, a first drying of the parchment, hulling while the bean is still wet, and a second drying of the bare bean. The published document puts the bean at 35 to 40 per cent water when it is hulled and 12 to 12.5 per cent when it is finished.

The consequence is easy to miss. A naturally dried or honey-processed lot from the same farms, of the kind a 2023 study collected in Takengon, falls outside the registered name however good it is. The specification also sets a picking standard of at least 85 per cent red fruit, with floaters removed, processed apart and kept out of the name, a first grade under the national defect standard, and a minimum bean size of 6.5 millimetres.

The fuller specification is not consistent on its own numbers. It gives the hulling moisture three different ways and the fermentation time two. Where it differs from the document the European Commission published, CoffeeHQ follows the published one and treats the rest as unsettled.

A harvest that barely stops

The specification gives the harvest as running from September to May or June. It explains why it is so long: rain falls through almost the whole year, so the trees flower and fruit continuously, with two peaks, in March and April and in October and November. The published document repeats the two peaks. The specification records one or two dry months, usually falling between February and May.

The rainfall and temperature figures behind this, an annual 1,834 millimetres over 149 days and 16 to 24 degrees, are the applicant's, credited to studies from the 1990s and to one airport's observations. They support the calendar; they are not a current climate record.

What the rules say about the farm

The specification describes coffee grown under shade, most often a leguminous tree it calls lamtorogung, with avocado and mandarin orange planted among the coffee as both shade and a second crop. It requires organic fertiliser, made largely from coffee pulp and manure, twice a year, and bans synthetic fertiliser, pesticide and herbicide for coffee sold under the name. Trees are pruned to a single stem about 180 centimetres high.

It puts the usual holding at about two hectares, with fewer than one farmer in twenty holding more. These are the conditions the society wrote for itself. They say what a compliant farm looks like, not how many farms comply.

Who checks, and what the name may be put on

Control is in layers. Each grower is meant to check their own plot; each farmers' group checks its members and reports yearly; the society inspects five groups chosen at random each April and three groups, cooperatives or processing units during harvest; and a team of experts inside Indonesia's intellectual property directorate is the public authority over all of it. Growers carry member cards, processors record whose fruit they bought, and each sack carries a lot code.

Before a lot may carry the name it is cupped by a panel the specification calls the Gayo Cupper Team, and a lot refused twice cannot be sold under the indication. The name may be used only on coffee that is entirely Kopi Arabika Gayo. A blend may not carry it, though it may state the share in its list of ingredients.

In 2015 the society counted 10,869 farming families and about 13,000 hectares among its members, against the more than 100,000 hectares of coffee it attributes to the highland. On its own figures, then, the registered name covered a minority of the region's coffee when the application was written.

Processing a source describes here

• Wet-hulled (giling basah)