Timor-Leste Tau-Rema

Region: Letefoho
Altitude: 1950 m.a.s.l.
Variety: Typica, Timor Hybrid
Processing: Washed

UK Arrival: November 2025

Tasting Notes: A straightforward, creamy coffee with single-origin chocolate notes and brown sugar sweetness. Mild prune-like acidity compliments the medium body and lingering roasted hazelnut finish.

We’re excited to have this coffee back for the third harvest in a row. We chose it three years ago for its quality and delicious flavour profile. We’ve stuck with it because it continues to improve. According to Karst Organics, the importer who brought us this coffee, the 12 smallholder farmers of Tau-Rema have conscientiously worked on caring for their coffee trees and improving the processing of their coffee.

The Producers

At close to 2,000 m.a.s.l., Tau-Rema is the highest altitude group working with Karst Organics, the importer who brought us this coffee. According to Karst, since their partnership began in 2021 Tau-Rema’s members have conscientiously worked on improving the processing of their coffee to meet the high standards required of the specialty market. Previously these producers sold their freshly harvested cherries to a local commodity buyer by carrying them approximately 2 km to the nearest mountain road. Seeing the year-on-year improvements resulting from their work has been a great example of how a community of coffee farmers can come together and make impactful changes to improve their livelihoods. 

Coffee from Tau-Rema is shade grown alongside other crops including yam, sweet potatoes, mangoes and avocados, most of which are daily food staples. This cool and shaded canopy provides a perfect environment for coffee cherries to slowly mature and develop their sweetness. 

The Coffee

Work on coffee tree pruning and rehabilitation has also benefited the Tau-Rema farmers and their coffee forests are now looking healthier and less wild. With careful pruning and care the coffee trees produce more cherries and they’re easier to harvest. Farmers are seeing their profits increase from the same number of trees because they’re producing more beans.

This coffee is fully washed, which in Timor Leste means that after picking the skin and fruit of the cherries is removed using a wooden hand-cranked de-pulper. Fermentation happens in barrels rather than in tanks as in some other origins. The beans are dried on raised beds underneath parabolic covers. The moisture levels are carefully checked to ensure that the coffee is dried well before it is bagged up and shipped to the drymill. This harvest, there was more wet weather, so drying took a little more time than it has in the past. 

After drying the coffee gets transported four hours down a treacherous, muddy mountain road to the dry mill where the parchment layer is removed and the beans are painstakingly hand sorted to remove defects like insect damage, black beans and sour beans. This is a crucial step in the creation of specialty coffee because these defects have a huge impact on the cup quality. This year Karst exported 34 tonnes of coffee, each kilo of which was quality checked by hand.

According to Karst, the high quality of this coffee is due to the hard work of the member farmers and Domingos de Jesus Lima, the leader of the Tau-Rema group, known as maun Domingos, meaning brother Domingos in Tetum, the country’s native language. The producers fully understand the expectations of the international speciality market and the diligent processing required to achieve a high scoring coffee. 

As the quality of Tau-Rema’s parchment has steadily increased year-on-year so too has the amount of revenue being paid directly to the community through sales to Karst. In 2021, Karst purchased 610 kilos of parchment at a price of USD 2.90 per kilo which had a total value of USD 1,769. Fast forward to 2025 and Karst purchased 1,694 kilos of parchment at  USD 4.00 per kilo which saw USD 6,776 paid directly into the community. 

Karst says that whilst these figures demonstrate progress, more work needs to be done to ensure that average household incomes in Tau-Rema continue to steadily rise and farmers can be financially self-reliant through sales of their coffee. Realistically, this will only be achievable with a greater focus on coffee tree rehabilitation activities which, although underway already, need consistent year-on-year attention to ensure increased yields. This will be a priority for Karst to ensure that Domingos and Tau-Rema’s farmers get the technical support they need from maun Simao (Karst’s Field Manager) and also the materials needed to rehabilitate and regenerate their coffee forests.  

The Importer

Karst Organics is a husband and wife team, Stuart and Kar-Yee, who trade coffee only from Timor-Leste. They spend 6 months there every year and during the harvest they live in the mountains of Letefoho, working alongside the farmers who produced this coffee. “This investment of time has helped us to better understand their communities, their language, their culture and expectations. Ultimately, this makes our mutual needs more transparent and allows us to be better partners,” they say. 

Transparency is a priority for Karst, who, for the six years they’ve been in operation, have published what they pay farmers for parchment and cherry as well as their offer price for roasters. In six years they’ve doubled the commercial price for cherry and made corresponding increases for parchment. This season, they paid farmers $4/kg for their coffee. Commodity coffee from Letefoho sold for between $2.25 to $2.75.

The Variety

Timorese coffee is also environmentally sustainable because it’s organic by default. The producers can’t afford fertiliser, so although their coffee isn’t certified organic, it is grown naturally. They use chicken poo, coffee cherry skin and soil as compost for their coffee trees. Karst has a great blog post that delves deeper into the organic issue HERE. 

In addition, East Timor is home to a unique variety of coffee plant, the Timor Hybrid. It’s a naturally evolved hybrid of the two main species of coffee: Arabica and Robusta. It has the flavour qualities of Arabica and the disease resistance of Robusta. Interspecies hybrids are rare, but in the case of the coffee plant it’s a positive development. Timor Hybrid has been used to develop disease resistant cultivars like Catimor, which is a cross between Caturra and Timor Hybrid (there’s a great blog post about that one by Ozone HERE) and the Sarchimor group, which is a cross between Villa Sarchi and Timor Hybrid. Coffee breeders have continued to cross and refine these since the 1950s, creating two whole new limbs on the coffee genetics family tree, and offering farmers the economic security of planting coffee trees that won’t be wiped out by leaf rust and other diseases. 

This lot also contains Typica, which is one of the two main parent varieties of Arabica coffee, along with Bourbon.

The Country

Timor-Leste is an island situated in Southeast Asia, approximately 1,000 miles east of Bali. With its lush green mountains and crystal blue sea, it may look like an idyllic paradise, but the reality is that this small country holds a troubled and complicated history. Timor-Leste is one of the few countries in the world to have been both colonised and annexed; colonised by Portugal from the 1600s to 1975 and annexed by Indonesia from 1975 to 1999. Having finally gained independence for a second time in 2002, Timor-Leste is the world’s second youngest nation state and trying hard to find its voice in the geopolitical world of the 21st century after centuries of subjugation. 

Coffee was first introduced to the island by the Portuguese and by the 1900’s was the country’s leading export, however the industry suffered greatly during the years of Indonesian annexation when the sector was largely ignored. Fast forward to the present day and you will see that the coffee farmers of Timor-Leste are working hard to collectively carve out a place for Timorese coffee in the global specialty coffee market, in addition to replenishing and rehabilitating their coffee forests which were so overlooked during the struggle for independence during the latter part of the twentieth century.

A note about packaging

Our coffee comes packaged in beautiful and hard-wearing tins. It is important to keep those beans away from air and light (see our blog post about coffee storage) and we think tins are the very best way of keeping those guys fresh. 

Tins can of course be easily recycled (with other metals) but the very best and most environmentally conscious thing to do with them is to refill them. Find out how to refill or dispose of your Steampunk packaging HERE.