You are holding the first batch
Two hundred bags came out of Kota Kinabalu in the first shipment Borneo Coffee Co ever made. If you have one of them, you got here early. Thank you.
This page is everything worth knowing about brewing it, and where it came from.
What is in the bag
Borneo Medium Roast. 250g.
Roasted 3 August 2026 in Kota Kinabalu, Borneo.
Natural process: the cherries dried whole in the sun, fruit still on the bean.
Dark chocolate, tropical fruit, caramel.
Scored 85 on the SCA form by a certified Q grader, April 2026.
Two things that matter more than the recipe
Grind right before you brew. Ground coffee goes flat within minutes. If you change one thing about how you make coffee, change this one. A hand grinder costs less than three bags and will do more for your cup than any recipe on this page.
Let the kettle stand about 30 seconds after it boils. Water at a rolling boil scorches a medium roast and pulls out a bitterness that is not actually in the bean. You want roughly 200°F, or 93°C.
Pour-over
What we would make first.
22 g coffee, medium grind, like table salt
350 g water at 200°F / 93°C
Rinse the filter with hot water and tip it out.
Add the coffee, level it, start a timer.
Pour 45 g of water and stop. Let it swell for 30 seconds.
Pour to 200 g in slow circles, then to 350 g once it drains halfway.
The bed should run dry around 3:00.
French press
30 g coffee, coarse grind
450 g water at 200°F / 93°C
Add coffee and all the water. Start a timer.
At 4:00, break the crust with a spoon and skim the foam off the top.
Press slowly. If you have to force it, your grind is too fine.
Pour it all out. Coffee left sitting on the grounds keeps extracting and turns bitter.
AeroPress
15 g coffee, medium-fine grind
220 g water at 200°F / 93°C
Standard orientation, rinsed paper filter.
Add coffee, pour all the water, stir three times.
Cap it, wait until 1:30, then press for about 30 seconds.
Drip machine
60 g coffee per litre of water, medium grind.
For most 12-cup machines that is about 60 g to a full carafe. Most machines under-dose badly at their own suggested scoop, which is why home drip has a reputation it does not deserve. Weigh the coffee once and you will not need to again.
Your 250 g bag holds about eleven pour-overs, eight French presses, or sixteen AeroPresses.
If it does not taste right
Bitter, drying, hollow at the end: over-extracted. Grind coarser, or pour faster, or use slightly cooler water.
Sour, thin, weirdly salty: under-extracted. Grind finer, or slow the pour down, or add a few more seconds of contact time.
Correct but dull: look at your water before you blame the coffee. Distilled and very soft water cannot extract properly, and heavily chlorinated tap water flattens everything. Filtered tap is usually the sweet spot.
Very fizzy and hard to pour through: that is carbon dioxide, and it means the coffee is fresh. It settles down over the first couple of weeks.
Where this coffee comes from
It grows near Mount Kinabalu, in Sabah, on the island of Borneo. Not on one farm.
Sabarica runs a nursery, hands seedlings to smallholders at cost, trains them on how to grow and pick, then buys back what they harvest and roasts it. This coffee is those micro-lots brought together. The trees grow inside a living five-layer forest, under canopy shade that slows the cherries down until they ripen dark purple, and the whole crop is picked by hand.
Borneo grows very good highland Arabica and almost none of it has ever left Southeast Asia. That is the entire reason this company exists. We are the first dedicated Borneo coffee brand in America.
More on the five-layer forest · Our story · Questions, answered plainly
Tell us what you thought
Honest notes are worth more to us than kind ones. If it was excellent, say so. If it was not, we would genuinely rather hear it from you than not hear it at all.
Write to info@borneocoffeeco.com, or just reply to your order email. Every message gets read by an actual person, which at the moment is a very short list of people.
What happens next
Batch two is being planned now and it will also be small. If you want to know when it lands before it sells out, you are already on the list if you ordered. Nothing else to do.
Questions about anything at all: get in touch.