STRAIGHT FROM TIMOR-LESTE

Coffee arrived in Timor-Leste with the Portuguese in the early 18th century. The fertile land suited it immediately and by the mid-18th century, coffee had become one of the country's most valuable exports. For all the wealth it generated, however, little was reinvested into the country's development. By the mid-20th century, Timor-Leste had become, in Karst's own words, little more than a neglected trading post.

On the 28th November 1975, Timor-Leste declared independence from Portugal. Nine days later, Indonesian troops invaded, annexing the country and commercially monopolising its coffee sector. The 24-year struggle for independence that followed was brutal — many of the older farmers Karst works with today fought side-by-side in the coffee forests of Letefoho during that period. Independence finally came on the 20th May 2002, when Timor-Leste became the first new country of the millennium.

Today, Timor-Leste is one of Southeast Asia's most underdeveloped nations. Food security is an urgent concern — the Global Hunger Index ranked it as the country with the highest hunger index in Southeast Asia as of 2023. Unemployment is high and the majority of the working population are subsistence farmers, most of them growing coffee. Karst was founded in direct response to this — and every decision they make about how they source, price, and sell reflects it.

Timor-Leste's complicated history and subsequent lack of development has, paradoxically, resulted in one of the most distinctive and environmentally sound coffee-growing environments in the world. Because chemical fertilisers were never introduced into Timorese agricultural practice at scale, all coffee grown in the country is organic by default — a fact that was largely unknown to the international specialty market until recently.

All of the coffee Karst sources is grown under a canopy of leguminous shade trees — primarily ai-kakeu (Casuarina) and ai-samtuku (Albizia) — which regulate temperature, contribute nutrients to the soil as their leaves fall, and support a biodiverse ecosystem that provides natural pest control. The average farm Karst works with is 1.4 hectares, but "farm" is almost a misnomer: the Timorese phrase is 'ba kafe laran' — go into the coffee — because these are small forests, not fields, with avocados, bananas, sweet potatoes, yams, and traditional medicinal plants grown alongside the coffee trees.

Cherry skins from pulping, composted with chicken or cow manure and soil, are applied to the base of trees before the rainy season, delivering phosphorous and potassium to support flowering and root health. Nothing synthetic enters the system.

The varietals are equally distinctive. Karst's coffees are produced from a combination of Typica and Hybrido de Timor — a natural hybridisation between C. Arabica and C. Canephora first discovered in 1917. The Hybrido de Timor delivers the cup quality of Arabica with the disease resistance of Robusta, and has since become the genetic foundation for many of the world's disease-resistant cultivars, including Sarchimors and Catimors. As climate change places increasing pressure on coffee-growing regions globally, the resilience of Timorese plants is not a footnote — it is increasingly significant.

Karst are unusual in the specialty green coffee world in one important respect: they are both exporter and importer, which means they control the full supply chain from farmgate in Letefoho to warehouse in the UK without intermediary agents at any stage. Every bag of cherry or parchment is purchased directly from each household by Stewart and Kar-Yee themselves, collected in their pick-up truck from each farm during the harvest.

Their pricing is fixed before the harvest begins and does not fluctuate. In 2025, their farmgate price for ripe red cherry was $0.85 per kilo for the entire duration of the harvest. The commercial price in Letefoho that same year opened at $0.50, peaked at $0.62, and dropped back to $0.55. All farmgate prices, processing costs, and shipping figures are published openly on Karst's website.

The 144 households Karst works with are organised into seven partner groups: Rotutu, Eratoi, Cristo Liurai, Hatuhei, Tau-Rema, Samoro, and Remagoa. Some sell cherry for processing at Karst's centrally managed wet mill; others process their own parchment at household level, supported by the pulping machines, fermentation buckets, and drying beds that Karst have supplied and funded over the years. The separation between groups allows Karst to maintain lot-level traceability across everything they export.

What Karst have built in Letefoho since 2017 is not just a sourcing operation — it is an accumulated body of investment in people, infrastructure, and agricultural practice. The timeline of that investment is published transparently on their website, year by year, but the headline figures tell part of the story: export volumes have grown from 4.8 tonnes in their first year to close to 34 tonnes in 2025, with quality maintained and over 90% pre-ordered before the harvest began.

Physical investments have included the construction and expansion of a centralised processing facility in Rotutu, the installation of 900 metres of water piping to provide reliable water supply to both the facility and local households, the supply of pulping machines, drying racks, and fermentation equipment to individual farming households, and — most recently — the construction of a new warehouse and cupping lab in Lebululi, being built by hand by Karst's local team.

Maun Simao, Karst's field manager, is a lifelong Letefoho resident with over 20 years' experience in Timor-Leste's coffee sector. He is one of two permanent full-time locally employed members of the Karst team, with additional seasonal workers contracted, registered with the labour department, and paid with social security contributions. Karst were insistent on formal employment contracts from the beginning, at a time when cash-in-hand, as-needed labour was the norm in the region.

In October 2023, Karst launched a tree planting initiative: for every 10kg of green bean sold to a partner roaster, they pledge to plant one seedling. The goal is 1,800 coffee trees per hectare, working toward a target yield of 5,400kg of cherry per hectare — a figure that would meaningfully increase average household income and long-term farm viability.