Bali

Wet-hulled in the shadow of a volcano, grown beside citrus trees, tended by a water system a thousand years old.

At the cup

• Cupping notes: Baker's chocolate, orange peel, juniper, molasses
• Body: Medium, clean
• Acidity: Low, with a bright orange-peel lift
• Roast level: Medium-dark

At the farm

• Region: Kintamani highlands, central Bali
• Altitude: 1,200–1,600 MASL
• Harvest: May–October
• Soil: Volcanic loam on the slopes of Mount Agung
• Process: Giling Basah (wet-hulled) — the Indonesian method that gives the beans their bluish cast
• Farming: Intercropped with citrus, grown without synthetic pesticides or fertilizers
• Varietals: Typica derivatives and Kartika

The story

Bali Blue Moon takes its name from the bluish cast the beans pick up during Giling Basah — the wet-hulling process that strips parchment while the coffee is still high in moisture. It is the same technique that shapes our Sumatra, and it produces a very different result. Where Sumatra goes earthy and syrupy, Bali stays clean: baker's chocolate over bright orange peel, with a molasses sweetness underneath.

The coffee grows between 1,200 and 1,600 meters in the volcanic loam of Mount Agung's Kintamani highlands, on small family farms that plant coffee among citrus trees. The soil is young and mineral-heavy — the kind of ground that only exists where a mountain has been rebuilding itself for millennia.

Those farms are organized through Subak Abian, a Balinese cooperative structure built on Tri Hita Karana — harmony between people, environment, and the divine — which has governed the island's irrigation for more than a thousand years. Under subak, water is allocated collectively rather than by whoever sits highest on the slope, and the schedule is set through the temple calendar. It is one of the oldest continuously operating systems of shared water management anywhere in the world, and it is the reason this coffee tastes the way it does.

Path to the Sea

Bali is a small island — about ninety miles across — and its water has a short trip home. Rain falling on the Kintamani highlands collects in Lake Batur, the caldera lake inside Mount Batur's crater and the island's largest freshwater reserve. From there it feeds the springs and rivers that supply the subak network, and then it runs for the coast. North-flowing rivers reach the Bali Sea within about twenty-five miles. South-flowing rivers reach the Indian Ocean.

East of the island lies the Lombok Strait, one of the main channels of the Indonesian Throughflow — the current system that carries Pacific water southwest into the Indian Ocean. Water that grew coffee on a Balinese volcano can join a current that has already crossed one ocean and is on its way to crossing another.

Indonesia is also one of the coastal regions where our cleanup partner CleanHub runs collection hubs. On this origin, the water and the work meet in the same place.

Shop the coffee

→ Moonlit Reef · Bali (medium-dark roast, wet-hulled)