Papua New Guinea

Roast:  Light-Medium

Tasting Notes: Milk Chocolate, Honey, Whipped Cream

We love unique coffees. And Papua New Guinea brings the unique vibes we look for: lots of nuanced flavors, balance and complexity, and a single origin coffee that is sure to start your day off right.

The Keto Tapasi Progress Association where we source this coffee was founded in 2008 as an association of smallholder coffee growers from 18 communities and villages in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, in the Chuave District. The organization has around 375 members, who cooperate and collaborate despite the vast differences in both culture and language between their heritage groups. The organization has been Fair Trade–certified since 2011 and certified organic since 2014, and has used the premiums it receives to invest in depulpers as well as warehouse space and transportation.

Smallholders typically own anywhere from a couple to a couple-hundred coffee trees, and sustenance farming on these more "garden-like" plots is common; the call them coffee "gardens," in fact, rather than farms, and the farms themselves have no names and carry no formal demarcation to indicate where one neighbor's land ends and the other's begins. Generally, the farmer members will depulp and ferment their coffee on their own farms; it is bought and sorted in parchment at the central mill in Goroka for drying, in deliveries from 25–65 kilograms.

The Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea is located in the center of the country close to the largest port city. This provides many farmers access to roads, while other producers are deeper in the mountains and valleys, growing coffee gardens in the rainforest. The cool temperatures of the valleys create some of the world's most diverse cloud forests. Coffees here ripen slowly under the forest shade with plenty of moisture. We love these beans, and we hope you do too!