I Ketut Jati has been growing arabica coffee in Bali's Kintamani highlands since 1985. Based in Desa Catur, he runs Kopi Gunung Catur and heads the local association (MPIG) that secured the Geographical Indication for Kintamani Arabica coffee. The certificate came through in 2008, the result of years of slow, patient groundwork.

Jati came to coffee the long way. After finishing school in Singaraja in 1985, he went back to Desa Catur to help his parents work the family land, about five hectares, part of it planted with coffee that never gave much of a harvest. Back then nobody saw coffee as something special. Farmers stripped the cherries off all at once, ripe and green together, dried them on the bare ground, and processed them roughly, the way it had always been done. Changing that meant breaking habits handed down for generations, and there was plenty of pushback at the start.

The drive for the Geographical Indication is what pulled it all together. Farmers were taught to pick only the ripe red cherries, the cultivation was reorganised, and the cooperative side was built up under the MPIG with full support from the local agriculture office. From 2003 to 2007, researchers ran year-after-year tests to prove the coffee's character stayed consistent, and those results were what earned the certification.

One thing makes Kintamani coffee its own. The trees are grown side by side with citrus, an intercropping method called tumpang sari, and that pairing gives the cup the clean, bright, faintly orange note that buyers now look for in a Kintamani arabica.

The change shows up where it matters most, in what farmers earn. Before 2000, ripe cherry sold for under a thousand rupiah a kilo, and today the price is many times higher. Coffee from Gunung Catur has been exported to Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. For Jati, the GI was never just a stamp on a document. It was a way to make sure the people who actually grow Kintamani coffee finally get paid what it is worth.