As a coffee drinker, I signed up for this tour as soon as I became aware of it. And now having seen the amount of effort required to produce quality coffee beans, I shan’t comment on the price of coffee ever again!
The Liberica coffee plant was introduced to Malaysia by British coffee planters after trials with Arabica and Robusta varieties failed to survive. The Liberica plant flourishes in lowlands and produces the largest berries of the main coffee plant varieties. Today the Liberican coffee bean is considered the indigenous Malaysian coffee and the My Liberica company are aiming to improve people’s appreciation of this type of coffee.
So I joined 30 other persons for the morning Coffee Plantation and Mill Visit, and 12 of us continued for the afternoon session at the My Liberica Roastery. The farm is located near Simpang Renggam, Johor, about an hour’s drive northwest of Johor Bahru, and is not open to casual visitors.
The farm also cultivates cocoa, papaya, pepper, and ginger flowers, so we took a look at these before the tour started at 9:20 am.
Our main guide today was Vivonne who guided us first around the farm to see and taste the coffee fruits. The coffee trees produce fruits twice a year, and today was not the main harvesting period. But you could still find a few red berries hidden in the bushes. The coffee trees have their tops cut off to make picking easier, otherwise they would grow as tall as the surrounding palm trees.
The outer red fleshy coat contains one or more beans, and if you suck on these beans they are very sweet, this is because of the thin covering around the beans. If the fruit contains just one bean, it is called a ‘cherry’ and these can be laboriously separated to produce a unique coffee flavour.
and then another machine to separate the beans from the red flesh of hte fruits. Here is our other guide Paul (from GU Travel) demonstrated this next step.
Then they are put through these brutal devices which attempt to seperate the beans from the red flesh of the fruits.
Much of the pulp and some beans come out at the front side of the machine (photo below left) while the ‘cleaner’ depulped beans shoot out from the back (photo below right).
After a period of fermentation and air drying, the beans still aren’t ready! During the fermentation process, the amount of red pulp will affect the final taste of the beans, and this is why they are sorted seperately.
In the room behind the tasting room we could watch as some of the final sorting and cleaning of the beans which occurrs prior to the roasting stage.
In the tasting room we sampled coffee leaf tea, coffee flower tea, coffee cherry tea, and their signature coffee. Every part of the coffee bush is used, and it is all delightfully packaged with a design detail reflecting Johor’s heritage weaving culture; a perfect present for that coffee-loving friend! Finally, we each planted three coffee beans in a pot to take home, but I don’t have green findgers so I do not hold out much hope for these.
For those of us taking the afternoon tour, we drove back into Johor Bahru and the My Liberica Roastery at EcoHub. We ate a tasty lunch and then learnt more about the history of coffee and the reasons behind different roasting times. Finally, we learnt how to prepare coffee using three batches of differently-roasted beans, and shared the results with others.
It was a long day of coffee-related matters, and I learnt so much from Vivonne; her passion for coffee is contagious. You can get details of future tours from the My Liberica Coffee FB page, or contact Paul of GU Travel (0167331082). Tours are currently run monthly, and the next one will be hosted in Mandarin. There are several My Liberica cafes around the area, so please consider supporting your local entrepreneurs in the future; producing high quality coffee is a labour of love for us all to enjoy.
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