When we asked Riza Zahrul Huda about the biggest challenge he had faced in coffee, we expected to hear about farming. Maybe pests, changing weather, coffee quality, or the difficulty of helping coffee from a small village reach a bigger market. Instead, Huda went quiet. His eyes filled with tears, and for a while, he couldn’t continue. It was unexpected because the question was simple, and everything before it had been a calm conversation about coffee and farmers. Eventually, he looked up and gave us an answer we didn’t expect: “The biggest challenge is actually from myself.”
RIZA ZAHRUL HUDA at GCAG 2026
We don’t know exactly what made Huda cry that day, and we don’t want to explain that moment for him. But the longer we listened to him, the more we understood how much of his life in coffee is connected to other people. Huda began working on the upstream side of coffee in 2018 in Selo Samiran, Boyolali. Since then, he has moved between farms and processing facilities across Central Java, including Pluluhan, where he started working in 2024. When we asked why he chose to work in coffee, his first answer wasn’t about flavor, competitions, or building a career.
“First of all, I am happy.”
He finds happiness in seeing farmers gather around one purpose and in watching them continue to work despite the challenges they face.
Over the years, Huda noticed something that bothered him: there is still a large information gap in coffee. Downstream, we constantly talk about processing, fermentation, quality, extraction, flavor, and how to make coffee better. But much of that information does not easily reach the people growing coffee in the villages. Farmers need access to knowledge about how to make their farms more productive, how to improve processing, and how to produce coffee with better cup quality.
“There is still a very wide gap… I personally want to become the bridge.”
When he learns something from the downstream side of coffee, he tries to bring that information back to the farmers. It sounds like a small thing, but perhaps many meaningful changes in coffee begin exactly like this: one person learns something and makes sure it doesn’t stop with them.
For Huda, better coffee is not only about achieving a higher score. He wants the farms themselves to have a future. In Central Java, and particularly around Pluluhan, many farmers are already getting older. Regeneration has become one of the challenges he thinks about most. Who will take care of these farms in the future? How can younger farmers find a reason to return? At the same time, farmers are dealing with pests, changes in microclimate, productivity, and cup quality. Huda talks about all these things as parts of the same problem. A good farm should be productive, produce good coffee, and still be sustainable many years from now. Sometimes, he even encourages farmers to accept a smaller harvest if it means protecting quality and avoiding practices that may hurt the farm in the long term.
RIZA ZAHRUL HUDA is grinding coffee for cupping at GCAG 2026
This is also why our conversation became much more personal when Huda talked about his own motivation. “How can I keep focused on the farmers?” he asked. There are times when his own energy disappears. He might think about going to the farm tomorrow instead, or next week, or perhaps only once that month. This part of his answer matters because people doing community work are often presented as if they have endless energy and never question themselves. Huda doesn’t pretend that is true. Sometimes he gets tired too. Sometimes he needs a reason to continue.
And strangely, that reason often comes from the same farmers he is trying to support. When Huda arrives and sees farmers who are still excited to learn, improve their farms, process coffee differently, and make something better, their energy changes his own. “Come on,” he remembers feeling. Their spirit makes him excited again. There is something beautiful about that relationship. Huda may bring information and support to the farmers, but the relationship does not move in only one direction. Sometimes he helps them keep going. Sometimes they help him keep going.
When we asked about his personal dream, Huda again brought the conversation back to the farmers. He doesn’t dream about becoming a big name in coffee or owning a huge amount of coffee.
“I’m not aiming for anything too big,”
he told us. What would make him happy is seeing farmers’ coffee accepted by the market and seeing them become excited about returning to their farms. He wants them to understand that if they take care of the coffee and take care of the land, what they produce can become something people genuinely enjoy drinking. When we pushed him a little further and asked what else he wanted for himself, his answer was almost too simple: he hadn’t really thought about it. Seeing the coffee accepted was already something to be grateful for.
During the GCAG coffee processing course in Indonesia, this became one of the lessons we took home with us. When we talk about changing the coffee industry, it is easy to imagine something big. A big organization, a big donation, a new technology, or a project that reaches thousands of people. But change doesn’t always arrive that way. Sometimes it is Huda traveling to another farm. Sometimes it is a farmer learning one better processing practice. Sometimes it is information traveling from a coffee shop back to a village. And sometimes it is simply giving someone enough encouragement to return to the farm tomorrow.
Huda also reminded us that this connection doesn’t end at the farm. When people around the world remain interested in coffee, when they continue visiting coffee shops and supporting good coffee, that energy can eventually travel upstream. A growing market can give small farmers another reason to believe there is a future in what they grow. Of course, buying a cup of coffee alone will not solve the difficult problems farmers face, but Huda sees the connection between the people drinking coffee and the people deciding whether it is still worth growing it.
Perhaps that is what Huda meant when he called himself a bridge. A bridge doesn’t need to become the destination. It simply helps people, knowledge, and opportunities reach the other side. Huda’s name may not be familiar to most people in the international coffee community, and many of the farmers he works beside may never be known outside their villages. But that doesn’t make their work small.
At I’M NOT A BARISTA, these are exactly the people we hope GCAG can stand beside. Not because we are coming to change their communities for them, but because people like Huda are already there, doing the work. Sometimes what we can do is connect a few more people, share some knowledge, bring some resources, and make sure their stories travel a little further.
Maybe one day, a farmer in Pluluhan will hold up a bag of coffee that has traveled much farther than they ever expected and proudly say, as Huda described it, “This is a product from my village.” For Huda, perhaps that is already something worth continuing for.
