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Lampung coffee farmers dream of welfare and price independence
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Coffee culture: Young entrepreneurs in Lampung establish their coffee businesses and empower local farmers. (Unsplash/Nathan Dumlao) (Unsplash/Nathan Dumlao)
As coffee shops grow in trend, Lampung grows to embrace its coffee industry and local farmers.
The coffee business is nothing new for Lampung, but the recent spike in coffee houses has enticed the younger generation to get involved.
As the entrepreneur behind El's Coffee and Kopi Ketje (Cool Coffee), Elkana Arlen Riswan's coffee story started before he was born. His grandfather was a modest coffee collector in the 1940s in a small district called Talang Padang, tucked inside the Tanggamus regency in West Lampung.
"I was born into the industry. My father expanded my grandfather's work and established a coffee bean exporting business. We have our processing plant," said Elkana, born in 1986, a year before his father started exporting coffees from Lampung.
After a decade in Melbourne, Australia, Elkana decided to return to his hometown to put his spin on the family's business.
"People know that [Lampungnese] coffee is good, but the industry didn't thrive as much. I want to change that. I want Lampung to have a good coffee industry so it can prosper from it," he said.
With his sister, Tia Riswan, and her husband, Giuseppe Emanuele Mannino, Elkana established El's Coffee for the first time in 2012 to target the premium market.
