How to Prepare Your CoffeeKopi Kawa Daun
Kawa daun is coffee brewed from the leaf, and it exists because the beans were taken. Under the Dutch forced-cultivation system West Sumatran farmers had to surrender every bean they grew, so they dried and roasted what was left to them — the leaves — and boiled those instead. Two centuries later the drink is still made the same way in the Minangkabau highlands: dark, dried leaves simmered until the water turns the colour of weak tea, strained through cloth, sweetened with palm sugar, and poured into a halved coconut shell resting on a small bamboo stand. It tastes of neither coffee nor tea exactly — astringent, faintly bitter, lighter-bodied than a bean cup. The Minang name comes from the Arabic qahwah.
Ratio breakdown
Ingredients run from the top of the cup to the bottom; the last item is the bottom layer. Values are normalized to a true 100% stack.
What you need
- ~200 ml per cupWater
- 1 teaspoon gula aren, or none at allPalm sugar
- ~15 g dried, roasted coffee leaves, crumbledCoffee leaves
Method notes
- Grind
- None — whole dried leaves, crumbled between the hands into coarse flakes
- Water temperature
- Boiled — simmered until the water runs brown, or steeped with water at 90°C
- Total time
- 20 min
Steps
Pick mature, yellowing leaves rather than young ones
The leaves chosen for kawa daun are the older, yellowish ones close to dropping. Minang producers prefer them for taste, and studies of the drink report a higher antioxidant content than in young foliage; a fresh green leaf gives a thin, grassy cup.
Dry the leaves, then roast or smoke them
This is the step that turns a leaf into a brewing ingredient, and it takes hours rather than minutes. Traditionally the leaves are smoked over cinnamon wood for two to six hours until they run brown to black — six hours is the profile most Minang drinkers prefer, and it is where the drink's faint sweetness and smoke come from. Sun-drying followed by a twelve-hour roast is the other documented route; modern producers use a drier at 70–90°C for six to ten hours.
Crumble the dried leaves and boil them in water
Crumbling exposes far more surface than a whole leaf, which is what lets a fifteen-to-twenty-minute simmer draw any colour at all — leaves give up their extract far more slowly than ground beans. The alternative documented method is to pour water at 90°C over the flakes and let them steep, which produces a lighter, tea-coloured cup.
Strain through cloth into the cup
Leaf fragments are much larger and more unpleasant in the mouth than coffee sediment, so unlike a boiled bean coffee this one is always filtered. A cloth strainer catches the flakes without taking the body out.
Sweeten with palm sugar and serve in a coconut shell
Gula aren rather than white sugar, and a sayak — a coconut shell halved and set on a short bamboo stand called a tengkak — rather than a glass. Both choices are remembered locally as marks of a time with no glassware and no refined sugar, and both were kept once there were.
Tips
- Judge it by colour, not by the clock — the brew is ready when the water runs a clear brown; older or more heavily smoked leaves get there faster.
- It takes milk, ginger or an egg in the modern shops of Payakumbuh and Bukittinggi, sold as kawa susu, kawa jahe and kawa telur — all documented local variations on the plain cup rather than departures from it.
- Serve it with something fried and sweet — pisang goreng, fried tapai, bika or sticky rice are the standard accompaniments.
- Expect astringency. The drying process leaves a tannic edge that reads closer to over-steeped tea than to coffee, and that is the drink working correctly.
Common mistakes
- Using fresh green leaves straight from the tree — without the drying and roasting there is no extract to draw, and the result is grassy water.
- Skipping the strain — leaf flakes in the cup are the one thing every local description warns against.
- Boiling it for an hour to make it stronger — past about half an hour the leaves give only tannin, and the cup turns harshly astringent rather than deeper.
FAQ
Is this really coffee if it isn't made from beans?
It is made from the coffee plant, which is the line this Atlas draws — Yemeni qishr is brewed from the dried husk of the cherry rather than the bean, and kawa daun is brewed from the leaf. Indonesian writing on it is careful about the distinction, with one widely-read piece calling it a drink of the coffee plant that is not coffee. It does contain caffeine; it does not taste like a bean cup.
Why did people start drinking the leaves?
The Dutch cultuurstelsel. Under forced cultivation in nineteenth-century West Sumatra, the entire coffee harvest had to be handed to the colonial authorities and growers were barred from keeping beans for themselves. The leaves were not covered, so they were dried, roasted and boiled instead. The practice appears in Multatuli's Max Havelaar, the novel that attacked the system.
What is the coconut shell for?
It is the traditional cup, called a sayak or tempurung — a coconut halved and set on a tengkak, a bamboo ring under ten centimetres tall that stops the round shell tipping over. Along with the palm sugar it is read locally as a memory of scarcity: no glass cups and no white sugar in the Minangkabau villages of the time. Roadside kawa daun stalls in the highlands still serve it this way.
Where is it drunk?
In the West Sumatran highlands — Payakumbuh, Bukittinggi, Batusangkar and Sawahlunto — and in Kerinci, where the same drink is called air kawo. It began as the drink of field workers taking a break at a dangau, the hut at the edge of a rice field, and is tied to Pai Maanta Kawa, the custom of carrying food and drink out to the people working the land.
The Atlas
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