Last year, Esther Singer, an environmental scientist turned entrepreneur, rode her scooter along un-asphalted roads to a rainforest in Flores, a remote region in Indonesia, in search of coffee. After jobs at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and in the biotech field, she wanted more meaning and purpose in her life and decided to begin her exploration in her mother’s homeland.
“I wanted to do something related to the environment, something agriculture, and I fell in love with coffee,” Singer says today. “I found the most amazing qualitative coffee in Southeast Asia that I’ve never seen in the United States or anywhere in the West, and I found them through direct connections with the farmers.”
So, she says, she stayed at their places, shared meals, walked their farms with them, and learned how they grow their coffee. “I decided this is a product that I think has meaning, is sustainable, (and) could be enjoyed by so many more people.” In addition, Singer learned that the coffee she’d discovered had never left the region, never been exported. In November, she launched her specialty coffee brand, Segara Coffee, to foster greater cultural connection and inclusivity.
Coffee is a $343 billion U.S. industry, according to the National Coffee Association. Brazil is the world’s leading coffee producer, followed by Vietnam, Colombia, Ethiopia, and Indonesia, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Some well-known Indonesian coffees originate in the Sumatra and Java regions. While coffee buyers purchase from importers and farm cooperatives — a centralized system that offers stable demand and pricing for Indonesian farmers — Singer omits the go-between and buys green coffee beans directly from multigenerational farmers outside of that network. And she roasts them in Reno.
If you look at a map of where most coffees are grown, a third of it is in Southeast Asia, Singer says. “It’s really Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia for the most part. And to have a third, basically, of the whole coffee belt be underrepresented or ignored in the specialty coffee scene is, to me, such an opportunity, and an honor, to introduce that and to just diversify.”
What we’re seeing, according to Marc Matsuo, is the burgeoning specialty coffee scene in Southeast Asia, which is slowly gaining traction in the States. He says even more will come from smaller farms. “I think you’re going to be surprised, and you’re going to hear more about these different regions. Now there’s smaller areas like Flores and Kintamani that are coming around,” says Matsuo, a master coffee roaster and co-founder of The Coffee Hunters, a Las Vegas-based newsletter and video platform devoted to the brew. Through their experimentation, these farmers are creating a niche market, he says.
It seems Singer has already caught on. She says her specialty-grade Arabica coffees are from various regions across Flores, grown in volcanic highland forests. Coffee from many Indonesian areas is also difficult to source because of supply-chain constraints and access. The archipelago country comprises more than 17,000 islands, and Singer had to drive a scooter to get to Flores’ mountainous terrain.
“Imagine trucks going there, and like a scaled operation,” she says. “It’s not always easy to establish that, and I think it helps to have some cultural connection, to speak their language.” Once in Flores, Singer realized outsiders hadn’t ventured very deep. She discovered more “exquisite coffees,” some grown on farms on “really steep slopes” that are inaccessible to machinery. At the time of this reporting, there’s only one other coffee from Flores circulating in the U.S., but that’s traditionally processed and produced by farm-co-ops.
Segara, which means “ocean” in Indonesian, is a company armed with a scientist’s perspective. While the brand focuses on the hallmarks of third-wave coffee movement, such as flavors, single-origin beans, and brewing methods, Singer already embraces characteristics of the fourth wave, such as environmental impact, transparency, and science.
“All of our coffees are grown in agroforestry systems, cultivated under shade trees within biodiverse ecosystems,” Singer says. “This supports soil health, water retention, and biodiversity, while providing farmers with diversified income.” She also has to align with the harvest cycle, she says, so her products aren’t always available year-round. She plans to offset that with releases from other Southeast Asian regions.
“They’ve also never left their own home regions,” Singer says. “So, we’re just going to continue the story and feature the whole continent.”
