Some references on the internet mentioned that Sumatra Island Indonesia has its own post-harvesting method called as Sumatra Wet Hull process or local says Giling Basah. This process has been historically done by locals and they have many reasons for it. Shortly, with this wet hull process, farmers can gain more benefit collecting money fast than selling other processed beans.

We will tell you a process that coffee cherry has to go through. Simplest steps to understand this process will be explained below.

1. Handpicked is the best way.

2. Pulping

Coffee Cherries being pulped.

3. Fermentation overnight

The simplest way to ferment the coffee is by soaking the coffee along with the mucilage aerobically.

4. Washing and Floating

Washing Process

After being soaked, the coffee bean then washed in a floater to clean the dirt while separating defect coffee bean. This is actually common protocols used for wet coffee processing. The more water used the better cleaner the coffee produced.

5. Bed Drying at the polytunnel

Once the washing stage is done, coffee is dried in a drying house by using a raised bed. A raised bed helps the air distributed very well from the upside and downside of the coffee.

6. Wet Hulling

What makes wet hulling called wet hulling is when the coffee is dried up to a certain level of moisture level (30-35%) or we can see it visually by the Labu color and parchment is cracked, the further step is by bringing the coffee to the hulling stage where the usual wet process let the coffee dried up to 11-13% of moisture level.

7. Drying

After getting the coffee seed out from parchment by a hulling machine we dry it spontaneously on the patio to boost drying duration.

8. Sorting and Grading

Once the coffee reaches 13 % moisture content, we’re ready to sort the bean by using suton machine (gravity separator) and manual sort by handpick to separate the coffee from primary and secondary defects.

9. Resting and Exporting

The next important process is resting because we need to drink a tasty sweet coffee not the grass and earthy sensation. The common resting duration can take up to 1 month and then coffee ready to be exported to the roaster.

Some coffee expert outside Gayo says that wet hull coffee is the cheapest and fastest way to get coffee with specialty physical grade, unfortunately, the taste character they get from wet hull don’t fulfill their expectation due to their earthy dominant, grassy and earthy.

Even one coffee professional said that this process may be thrown out from the cupping table in the Central American area due to lack of specialty character.  We say it might be absolutely true if they mentioned those 3 years ago (we write this article in 2019). This happened because the fermentation and drying process was not completely improved, so the negative aspects were easily shown up. But for now, we can guarantee that our wet hull in Gayo will impress you with medium body, brown sugar, good acidity, and also clean after taste, there will no earthy, grassy, or even spices.