The story
Papua New Guinea takes up the eastern half of the island of New Guinea, north of Australia. Its coffee comes mostly from steep, green mountains in the middle of the country. Coffee Review's Kenneth Davids notes that, despite being close to Indonesia, its coffees are quite different from those of Sumatra or Java.
Coffee arrived in the colonial era. The importer Cafe Imports says Germans and British colonised the country in the 1800s, and that the British planted coffee around Port Moresby to sell to Australia. The green-coffee trader Sucafina traces the first official record of coffee to an 1890 colonial government report. In 1928 the colonial government planted Arabica at an agriculture station at Wau, in Morobe. That plot was later sold and renamed Blue Mountain Coffee, and Sucafina says most coffee plants in the highlands today can be traced back to it. Seeds then passed through a station in the Aiyua Valley, in the Eastern Highlands, and out to small farmers across the highlands.
The industry grew quickly after the Second World War. Sucafina says the area planted with coffee rose from 147 to 4,800 hectares between 1951 and 1965, mostly on small highland plots. Davids credits Australians with building the modern industry in the 1950s.
Today, small farmers grow most of the crop. Sucafina puts their share at 85 percent or more, and says most of them grow Arabica above 1,500 metres. Cafe Imports counts about 280,000 smallholder farmers. Most plots are better called "coffee gardens" than farms: coffee is grown in small patches alongside food and other cash crops. Cafe Imports says a typical garden is around one to two hectares.
Estates still exist. Davids names Carpenter Estates and its Sigri Estate as the main large estate with outside owners, and says only a fairly small share of the coffee now comes from estates like it. Sucafina works with Baroida Estate in the Eastern Highlands, which also serves as a wet mill for nearby smallholders.
Most coffee comes from four highland provinces in the centre of the country, according to Davids: the Western Highlands (around Mount Hagen and the Waghi Valley), the Eastern Highlands (around Goroka and Kainantu), and Jiwaka and Chimbu (also spelled Simbu) between them. Morobe, further east, also grows smallholder coffee. Sucafina lists the Western Highlands, Eastern Highlands, Morobe and Jiwaka as key regions.
Getting coffee out of the mountains is hard. Sucafina describes dirt roads that rain can close for days or weeks. Cafe Imports points to the many separate communities and languages, which make it harder to organise farmers into groups. The national coffee body, the Coffee Industry Corporation (CIC), works on regulation, research, quality and farmer training, and Sucafina credits it with a rise in quality in recent years.
How it's processed
A coffee bean is the seed inside a small fruit called a cherry. Papua New Guinea's coffee is mostly washed: the fruit is removed and the beans are fermented and rinsed before drying. Cafe Imports lists washed as the processing method for the country.
Many smallholders do this at home. Sucafina describes farmers removing the fruit with small hand-turned drum pulpers, fermenting the beans for about 36 hours, washing off what is left of the sticky fruit layer and drying the beans on raised beds, on tarps or in mechanical dryers. Other farmers sell whole cherries to a central mill, which gives the mill more control over quality.
Davids describes an old split. Estates and mills near the highway produced cleaner, conventionally washed coffee with grades such as A and B. Coffee washed by hand in remote villages was bulked together and graded Y. Over the last twenty years or so that line has blurred: some small-farmer coffee has improved and is now sold separately. Cafe Imports notes that the grading system looks at colour, shape, defects and cup quality as well as bean size.
Harvest runs from May to September, with a smaller "fly crop" in January and February, according to both Cafe Imports and Sucafina.
What it tastes like
Davids describes the top lots from central mills as bright but balanced, sweet, and gently fruity and floral. The fruit can range from stone fruit through ripe citrus to black currant, often with chocolate notes running from raisiny dark chocolate to cacao nib. The note he links most with high-end Papua New Guinea coffee is a sweet, sharp one like pink grapefruit.
Bulked smallholder coffee tends to be more rustic. Davids describes mild fruit-ferment and earthy hints, and says these village coffees can be inconsistent but often have a sweet, slightly funky charm.
The varieties are mostly old Arabica types. Cafe Imports and Sucafina both list Typica, Blue Mountain (a Typica line from Jamaica) and Arusha. Because quality depends so much on where and how a lot was processed, the notes on each coffee are a better guide than any country-wide rule.