Papua Nya Guinea Kindeng Hill Natural

This naturally dried - and delicately fruity - coffee comes from the Kindeng Dry Mill, located in the Jikawa province of Papua New Guinea. It is a blend of coffee beans from around 1500 small family farms in the Kindeng & Arufa regions.

After the coffee-cherries are received, they are sorted and then dried on raised drying beds. The cherries are moved several times a day during the drying process, which lasts an average of 1 month, to ensure an even and uniform moisture content. The fruit character of the coffee is clear, there is also a lovely smoothness and a nice balance between tropical fruit, dried berries, sweet chocolate, blackberries and a long aftertaste.

BACKGROUND

The average farm size of producers in this area is about 1-2 hectares, and the soil is generally sandy loam and loamy clay. After cherries are received at the mill, they are processed accordingly and dried on raised beds and canvasses. They are moved multiple times a day throughout the average 1-month drying process to ensure an even and uniform average moisture content across the lot. Once the coffee is adequately dried, it is placed into bags, stored in a cool and dry warehouse, hulled, milled, and prepped for export.

In the contemporary global coffee industry, Papua New Guinea is wholly unique both in how coffee is harvested and exported from the country. While there are some estates and plantations, most coffee production comes from smallholder farmers, each with around 1–2 hectares of land called “gardens” on which they grow small amounts of coffee along with whatever else a family or community might need for use or sale.

Sourcing coffee in Papua New Guinea poses unique logistical, cultural, and linguistic challenges. The country’s many indigenous populations are often very distinct from one another in terms of custom and language, and individual communities might comprise only a few hundred people, making communication and the cultural sensitivity required to do business here more difficult than in other coffee-growing regions. Less than 10 percent of the population is connected to or uses the Internet for communications, and there are roughly 55 telephones (both fixed-line and cellular) for every 100 people.