Kong Djie Coffee

Kong Djie Coffee traces to 1943, when Liong Kong Djie opened a coffee warung in Tanjung Pandan, the main town on the tin-mining island of Belitung. The brew that made the stall's name is sock-filtered coffee — hot water poured through a cloth filter packed with grounds, a technique that predates modern pour-over equipment by decades and remains the house method today.

What began as a single Belitung stall grew, over the decades, into a chain with a presence across Indonesia, but the original Belitung shops have kept the founding identity intact rather than becoming just another outpost of a national brand. Locals and visitors alike treat the Tanjung Pandan coffee houses as a genuine institution — the kind of place where the sock-filter technique is less a nostalgic throwback than simply how coffee has always been made there.

Belitung's own coffee-house culture, which Kong Djie helped anchor from its earliest days, has become a defining feature of the island's identity, standing alongside its white-sand beaches and granite boulders as a reason travelers make the stop. More than eighty years after Liong Kong Djie first set up his stall, the name still means the same cup of strong, cloth-filtered coffee it always did.