Papua New Guinea

2008-02-24T19:43:00.000-08:00

We are currently researching great coffees from little known regions around the world.

If there is a great coffee that you may have experienced, please share it with us so that we can pass it on to Coffee Lovers everywhere.

Currently of interest: Papua New Guinea

Many characteristics usually attributed to Jamaican Blue Mountain, for a only a porttion of the price.

Coffees from Papua New Guinea are sweet and floral. The original seedlings were from Jamaican Blue Mountain planted in 1927. The best coffees display a pungent, mango and papaya fruitiness in the aroma with a clean full-bodied flavor.

Seedlings of the famous Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee plant found their way to New Guinea in the 1920s. Ever since, they've been producing sweet, floral coffee with a pungent, fruity aroma -- but with a flavor profile of its own.

Coffee is the most important agricultural export for the native people of New Guinea. The plants that bear these coffees are transplants from the famous Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee estates. New Guinea shares many of the unique flavors of Jamaican Blue. Look for a sweet acidic flavor with a mild, medium body.

Since Papua New Guinea is among the world's youngest coffee-producing regions, exporting coffee at its earliest point during the late 1970s, it did not absorb the decades of western-influenced cultivation practices of agrochemical fertilization and pesticide suffocation.

New Guinea farmers are thus historically familiar with organic cultivation methods in the mountainous regions still protected by bird-friendly canopies of natural shade-producing native tree and shrub species. Papua New Guinea was among the earliest regions to adapt to -- and be certified internationally -- to certifiable organic cultivation standards. Numerous international organic certification organizations have licensed Papua New Guinea coffees.

It is a country where vehicular travel is still treacherous, often requiring extended excursions by four-wheel vehicles just to reach coffee-cultivating communities. Many communities are isolated and inaccessible for long stretches, particularly during the six-month-long rainy season.
Hundreds tiny mud-graded airstrips also dot the New Guinea landscape in areas too remote for convenient delivery of coffee to market.

Farmers in these areas harvest, wash and sun-dry green coffee beans in makeshift courtyards hewn out of the forest canopy adjacent to their tiny villages and await the arrival of planes to transport their valuable product to market.
It is a crucial life-blood enterprise, because -- contrary to small farmers worldwide who now diversify their crops -- coffee farmers of New Guinea still cultivate coffee as their sole source of revenue. The do so on small tracts of land that support between three-to-six thousand trees, and if they do not process green coffee themselves, lugging it to mills on foot, taking up to a day or two to deliver their goods. So, local farmers will transport their coffee market stuffed in burlap bags they sling over their shoulders with a strap looped over their heads and supported by their foreheads.

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Papua New Guinea