When people think of the coffee business, they usually think of café owners, baristas or even coffee farmers. However, a new trend of coffee-related businesses such as roasteries, roasting classes and roasting machine manufacturing is emerging around Jakarta.

Andreas Andrianto Hardjito, a coffee enthusiast turned roaster, started his business in 2014 called Rosso Micro Roastery to seize the opportunity of the growing trend of coffee shops in Jakarta by providing roasted beans.

“We help people set up their coffee shops, for example, by supplying the green or roasted beans,” he said.

The roastery, which is located in Serpong, South Tangerang, roasts coffee beans from all over Indonesia such as Gayo from Aceh and Temanggung coffee from Central Java. He cooperates with local farmer associations and village cooperatives to get the supply of the coffee beans.

He roasts the beans with a machine, which was made in Indonesia by a company called Froco, with a capacity of 15 kilograms. He then packs the roasted beans into 250-gram and 1-kilogram bags, which are then sold with prices starting at Rp 50,000 (US$3.50).

“People can also roast their own beans with us, but it is not our main business,” he said, adding that for each kilogram of coffee the customers roasted, they had to pay Rp 75.000.

Roasting is a heat process that turns coffee into dark brown beans, while bringing out the aroma and its flavor, said founder of A Bunch of Caffeine Dealers (ABCD) School of Coffee Henri Kurniawan.

As a school, ABCD is a training ground for coffee enthusiasts, but also provides a coroasting space for the public. The roasting space is intended for individuals or businesses who do not own a roaster.

According to Henri, the price of roastery machines can range from Rp 8 million to Rp 1 billion. Henri suggests that people do a trial run in the coroasting space and learn how to roast coffee properly before investing in a machine.

He added that roasting was appealing to people because they could create signature coffee flavors. Roasting acts as the coffee’s fingerprint, which means that the process and the result cannot be copied by another person.

“I used to hear that people wanted to be baristas, now everyone wants to become a roaster,” Henri said, adding that nowadays coffee shops were also adding roasteries into their businesses for added value and customer experience.

Coffee shops in Jakarta such as Anomali Coffee, Tanamera and Common Grounds have all implemented the merging between café and roastery.

Henri said that since ABCD opened in 2014, a lot of college students had joined his coffee school.

The school, which is located in Cikini, Central Jakarta, provides lessons on coffee history, coffee business, brewing and the newly opened roasting class. For a price of Rp 8.8 million, students can get the full course, or people can take individual classes starting from Rp 500,000.

Another roasting class is offered by William Edison, who started his career as a roaster manufacturer.

The William Edison Coffee Lab in Alam Sutera, Tangerang, Banten gives students roasting lessons for Rp 5 million. William started training roasters in Bali at the end of 2015, and he said that as many as 300 students had graduated from the roasting classes.

William first dabbled in the coffee industry by working part-time in a coffee factory in 2005. After about five years of working in the coffee industry, he decided to try and make his own roaster.

“The inspiration came when I wanted to start a coffee business but found that the price of the machine was too expensive,” he said adding that most machines were imported and priced at around Rp 60 million for a 1-kg-capacity machine.

After spending a year developing his own roaster, he said he decided to sell his first machine at Rp 7.5 million, which he considered to be affordable at the time.

Over the years, he said he had added new features, and the roasters, which he named after himself, are now sold at Rp 15 million to Rp 142 million, with capacities ranging from 100 grams to 12 kg.

He said that on average, his team of 15 employees could make 25 machines in a month. Some of them have been exported to Switzerland, Sweden, Finland, the United States and Nicaragua.

“Opportunities for aspiring coffee roasting manufacturers are still wide open,” he said, adding that Indonesia was blessed with an abundance of coffee beans and it was only a matter of how the producers could give added value by roasting them to perfection. (eyc)

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