PAPUA NEW GUINEA COFFEE BEANS

All of Papua New Guinea’s Arabica coffee plants have been grown from the seeds of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee trees and share the characteristics of that highly prized crop: sweet, smooth, clean and mild. As more than 90 percent of PNG’s coffee is grown on small “coffee gardens” and the rest on large plantations, there is a difference in taste, depending on how the beans are cultivated and processed. On the larger estates, the coffee cherries are taken to a central point where the hulls are removed; then, the beans are washed and left to ferment for a day and dried in the sun. This leads to a smooth coffee with a mild flavour, gently acidic with hints of black cherry and ginger. Sigri is one of the most famous estate coffees. Premium smallholder coffee, on the other hand, grown on the fertile soils of the wilder terrain of the western or eastern highland province, (Simbu, Morobe and East Sepik) is picked by hand and dry-processed. This produces a different kind of drink: fruity, tart and nutty, with chocolate and citrus. Perhaps its best speciality coffee is the peaberry. This is a small crop produced when some of the Jamaican Blue Mountain cherries mutate, so each pod contains not the usual two beans but just one. As a result, the beans are “beefed up” – more intense in flavour, aroma and acidity.