A trader will contact you with shipping and payment options after checkout. Please note: free samples are provided to commercial roasting businesses only.
Crop to Cup’s tenth year sourcing from Papua New Guinea arrives with significant changes in producer engagement, increases in collaboration and support from Crop to Cup and the growth of our roster of suppliers.
Strong demand for PNG’s unique offering of traceable, distinctive cup profiles available at high volumes and strong price points continues to drive our fascination of and exploration into a country often overlooked by specialty buyers.
While our second-largest country of origin by annual import volume, the majority of our business from Papua New Guinea comes via direct sourcing on behalf of roaster clients based on target price and cup profile. Thus, most of what we import from PNG does not end up on our spot list; roasters who wish to participate in our PNG sourcing should engage us early in the booking season (July/August) for the search and sampling process.
In 2023, shipping delays plagued exports, with long delays both at Lae (as ships skipped the port) and transshipment as longer routes carried coffees around multiple continents. These delays resulted in some lots arriving faded; combating these problems is a major focus of our 2024 harvest plan and targeted interventions. This plan involves significant changes at both the farm and export levels.
With the exception of a few well-known estates, coffee from Papua New Guinea, for the most part, comes from smallholders with very little attention paid to high specialty production as a result of the strong involvement of middlemen. While middlemen play a valuable role in bringing the coffee economy to remote areas high up in the mountains, they add yet another factor working against quality promotion between buyer and seller. With so many disparate cultural groups and languages across the Highlands, PNG culture has traditionally also not lent itself well to cooperative export structures. AAK is one of the few organizations in the country to have successfully organized farmers across the Western, Central and Eastern Highlands into cohesive groups focused on quality.
After the passing of AAK Cooperative’s former leader Brian Kuglame in 2022, the AAK network significantly weakened as a result of a lack of central organization. For 2023, Crop to Cup nominated cluster groups for specific improvements depending on their needs in order to maintain our commitment to AAK-associated clusters and engage across the network. We’re expanding this direct cooperation with AAK clusters thanks to our organizing partner Regina Lusaro from our exporter partner PNGCE. Regina carries on the legacy of Brian, carrying the torch of AAK torch and working with us to support all interested clusters. In moving to more focused collaborations with individual clusters rather than engagement with a strong centralized cooperative (what AAK used to be), our current communication and engagement at the cluster level allows us to target QC initiatives to each cluster’s individual needs and circumstances (processing customs vary widely across the different Highlands regions).
Harvest volume is down this year in PNG as a result of extraordinary rainfalls. We’ll be working quickly to speed up shipping timelines this year from offer through approval since harvest arrived 1.5 months early—if you have an interest in specific projects or coffees in PNG, now is the best time to reach out to your trader.
At farm level, we are expanding the program we launched last year to cherry selection, sorting and drying practices and, when weather permits, move away from rapid drying that is common across both smallholders and large wet mills. While drying quickly allows a producer to process more coffee in limited space, it does not allow for stabilization of moisture within the seed as indicated by the resulting high water activity and commensurate greater tendency to fade early.
Changing drying practices is challenging; increasing drying time to 15 days requires that a producer triple their cost of labor and triple the requisite amount of drying space. Further, to dry slowly, producers typically must dry on raised beds—requiring the construction of additional beds as drying slows, creating bottlenecks in drying infrastructure. In Papua New Guinea, extending drying times increases the risk of theft of the coffee during drying, making these interventions more easily executable at private estates versus smallholder contexts. As we have done with our successful collaborations in Ethiopia and Mexico, we advise hesitant farmers—whose main source of income is coffee—to test the model first with a small portion of their harvest that Crop to Cup commits to purchasing, paying a premium over the cost of conventionally dried lots. Upon evaluating samples of the resulting lot, our QC lab in New York shares their results with the producers during offer, pre-shipment and arrival sampling processes. Based on the feedback they receive and the premiums offered, farmers are entrusted to make their own decisions to increase the portions of their harvest that go through this extended drying program.
Unlike Ethiopia and Mexico, where many farmers have the financial means or access to financing to quickly purchase their own materials, smallholders in PNG require more intensive financial support for the tools needed for proper drying and proper cherry processing. Finance is provided both directly and facilitated by Crop to Cup—including from roasters who buy coffee from PNG coffee through Crop to Cup. Crop to Cup and our roaster customers contribute roughly $10,000 per year to support the following material support:
Additional materials supplied locally include timber and labor for construction of sheds and raised beds.
While we find that the implementation of processing improvements (cherry flotation and processing, slower drying, clean water, lot separation and storage) can be slow in PNG, Crop to Cup has demonstrated through our work over the last decade our commitment to longitudinal projects that improve smallholder market access and equity. We expect that results will show in the 2024 import and progressively increase in subsequent years yielding not only more reliable water activity readings indicating better shelf life, but also improved cup scores from a more diverse offering of regional cup profiles.
Quality-driven processing practices and lot separations—while the de facto standard in specialty in many other countries where we work—is still uncommon in PNG. Crop to Cup is proud to work with and buy from producers who recognize the potential of improving the value of their harvests through postharvest processing practices and who want to be some of the first in PNG to achieve a new standard of production.
Our producer roster for 2024 will include our long-term engagement with clusters from the AAK Cooperative network as well as a wide variety of new-to-us suppliers across the Western, Central (Simbu) and Eastern Highlands. Beyond AAK clusters, our newly varied supplier roster includes larger wet mills, smallholder estates (10-20 hectares) and additional smallholder groups, including:
Peter Lucas Yayuho, Eastern Highlands (Asaro)
This year, we’re working toward building relationships with “small estates” or “sizable smallholders” as we look for partners who can implement best-in-class drying, storage and lot separations. Of the 15 properties like this in Asaro district, we met Peter,better known as Peter Seed (“Yayuho” means “tree seed” in their village’s local language). These estates were started roughly 90 years ago by colonial Australian communities, and some trees from then still stand and produce (very little) cherry, with trunks over a foot wide. Peter is the only of these small estates—now almost all owned by local PNG families—to focus on specialty, and is in the middle of a large renovation program. We collected leaves to confirm Peter and Elizabeth’s belief that their two tree types are Mundo Novo and something similar to Arusha (K7); in other words—to confirm the cultivars of the first coffee trees brought to PNG. Mundo Novo, of course, wasn’t discovered in Brazil until 1943, and Arusha (now known to be identical to K7) wasn’t brought from Kenya until the 1950s—so there is a tantalizing possibility that these trees may represent something else entirely such as Typica (brought to PNG in the 1920s) or Bourbon (1930s).
Roteps Wet Mill, Western Highlands (near Hagen)
At the end of last season, the Roteps family took back this large wet mill, having leased it out for the past two seasons. They are now participating in Crop to Cup’s new specialty program with a few small lots. They primarily source from select farmer groups between the Western Highlands capital of Hagen and the Baiyer Valley to the northwest. Roteps—like several of the other larger wet mills we work with—provides excellent options for cup profile consistency across larger volume lots. Their substantial facilities also allow testing of new processing/improved methods without risking an entire picking.
Waingar Cluster (AAK), Kerewagi District, Simbu Province (Central Highlands)
Waingar has long been one of the most focused clusters of the AAK network. Their local region is one of few in PNG where coffee farming forms a strong economic backbone, and not just a quick tool to pay for immediate expenses. Their farms are thus a bit larger than most other smallholders (here they manage 1+ hectares each), so through their 22 member families the cluster is able to produce an impressive volume relative to other clusters. In the offseason, the Waingar Cluster constructed raised beds (though they still need to build more) and installed cherry flotation bins; in the middle of the 2024 season, they started shade drying and using the new pulper and motor provided by Crop to Cup. One of their main challenges faced by the group is access to water, as they must pipe it in from over a mile away. For this year, we are working with the Waingar cluster to improve their pump and water storage infrastructure (moving away from a natural pit in the ground). We expect to see Waingar lots separated by processing method (with and without shade) and separated by week (they usually pick and process every two weeks) appear on our offer sample cupping tables this year, and we hope some of their lots make it onto our microlot menu.
Ukuni Women and Farmers Association, Banom Village, Baiyer Valley (Western Highlands)
The breathtaking drive up the Baiyer valley—up one of the most treacherous 4×4 roads we’ve experienced in our sourcing years—leads to Ukuni Village. It is a substantial community despite its remoteness, and the group’s 150 members harvest from farms 0.5 to 1 hectare each. Ukuni, which was founded in 2010, currently produces 1-2 containers per year. For 2024, they joined Crop to Cup’s quality improvement program in the hopes of moving from mostly commercial customers into the more lucrative microlot market. Challenges here include a lack of centralized processing as a result of the village’s remoteness. Because we expect microlot contributions to be small this year, Ukuni will also provide unique traceability for roasters buying larger lots for blending.
Lahamenegu Mill (R&D/Demo Lots), Eastern Highlands (Goroka)
Compared with other coffee producing countries, specialty coffee in PNG is largely centered around what we call the commercial specialty market, and there are very few producers preparing peak quality microlots using the processes or practices that one may commonly find in countries more widely renowned for quality like Colombia or Ethiopia. In this sense, the quality potential for coffee from PNG and its many different regions and climates from the Western to Eastern Highland remains unknown—a mystery that Crop to Cup believes we can crack in the next few years through close collaboration and partnership with the suppliers and growers we buy from. To further study this potential we are working with our export partner, PNGCE, at their large wet and dry mill facility near Goroka, called Lahamenegu, to implement specialized washed, honey, natural and co-fermentation trial lots. As a large mill, PNGCE has the training and staff—including Rodrigo Santamaria, a veteran producer transplant from Colombia—to provide the attention and monitoring these lots need. We cupped Lahamenegu natural and honey lots during our sourcing trip in 2024 and are eagerly awaiting samples of coffees processed using other methods including a pineapple co-ferment (pineapple is a popular crop in the region). Cherry at Lahamenegu is selected and sorted from the best deliveries on any given day, thus these lots will not have traceability to individual contributing farmer level. The production of top lots in a highly controlled environment monitored by expats is not innovative in itself, and is not our goal; rather, our goal with the lots from Lahamenegu is to provide the initial research needed to demonstrate to producers—hundreds of smallholder farmers who supply us—what is possible from their farms, and that the higher qualities and higher prices are worth the extra effort.
In addition to processing interventions to improve cup outcomes and promote longer shelf life, we also plan to significantly speed up our export process this year to get ahead of potential shipping delays (which are always a concern for an export location as far and with as few inbound shipments as PNG). In recent years, we experienced delays while waiting to assess options from the eternity of the year’s production (to decide on customer blend components) instead of booking quality lots as they came in; this year, we will book based on initial quality assessments in order to move coffee to milling and shipping quickly.
For this reason, roasters who plan to source larger PNG lots through Crop to Cup (e.g. custom sourcing, not from a list of lots we are already planning to bring in), should contact your trader immediately with details of your needs, and to get on the list of roasters who will receive samples. We have already gone through our first round of PNG offer sampling, and expect the second round cupping to take place in early August.
|
|
|
|
|
|
THE SECOND HARVEST
MUDDY FEET AND CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT IN KEFFA ZONE’S NEWEST PRODUCER |
Efrem was first introduced to us in 2017 as a new but trusted producer by Crop to Cup Ethiopia organizer, Moata. His year-one quality was through the roof. No complaints there. We met him during a stop in Bonga town, where we shared an Ambo and some tibs (pictured). It was enough time to hear a story that included military, Cuba and Israel, and not near enough time to wrap our heads around a saga of that magnitude. Which is to say, we were very interested to learn more.
Fast forward to November as we are visiting near the onset of the 2018 harvest. The November rains stayed late this harvest, so we got stuck in mud. Lots of mud. Day one started with a slow and sloppy hike into the farm which gave us time to hear more of Efrem’s story. He is an Ethiopian-born, Cuban-educated and part-time Israel-residing accountant who returned to work in his home community through coffee some six years ago.
You may remember that the US took part in a series of airlifts that brought almost all of Ethiopia’s Jewish population (~120,000 souls) to Israel following the ‘violent red terror’. But the Beta Israel (as they are called) have a history in Ethiopia that they trace back to the tribe of Dan (son of Moses), and now a few brave members, like Efrem, are coming home to reestablish their community.
“They claim Decha is the birthplace of coffee, and that coffee is the source of happiness for our people. Emero means happiness…” Efrem explains as he serves us delicious coffee, taro root, and a bread made from fermented roots of false banana trees. “This is what we eat here on the farm” he continues, as our small group politely nibbles on the spread.
Noticing my sweat, and not knowing it was from the false banana bread, he changes topics. “The hike here, it was hard wasn’t it? I’m hoping to build a road by next year”. Actually, he needs a few roads, one being a foot-bridge over a local river (where we saw cattle being dragged by the horn through fast moving waters deeper than their heads.)
Later we found out that Efrem took us the long way into the farm. Not a bad way to show off his estate, which included not only coffee but cardamom, teff, old growth trees and easily startled spider monkeys. Or perhaps he took us the long way so that we’d work up a soggy-footed, high-elevation sweat.
In the parts where hiking was not possible, we saddled up. When horses could not make it, we jumped on a tractor borrowed from a neighboring farm. This is the western highlands and the highlands are wet almost year-round…which is why our first conversation with Efrem was on the subject of drying.
While the harvest had just begun, Efrem’s drying trays were already thick with the first collection. When preparing naturals it is common to gradually increase the depth of they cherry pile (as a decrease in overall moisture occurs), this is done to consolidate and avail drying space for incoming cherry. But especially during the first few critical days cherries MUST be one layer thick and no more.
It was clear that Efrem would need more drying beds in order to scale up with the harvest. The day following our visit we saw a facebook update – viola!, more drying capacity. We are not surprised; this is Efrem’s style. He’ll take advice into immediate action. Last year Efrem’s farm was brand new. In a years time, he constructed a brick-making operation, invested in a ton of raised bed drying, and erected two facilities, an office + warehouse. Next on his to-do list is a vacuum packing machine.
This year, in addition to growing his volumes from 1 to 2 containers (ambitious), Efrem set goals around investing in local schools and improving the roads.
We bought all of Efrem’s coffees this year. Most of it has been contracted out before arrival. But there’s still a few bags that we reserved for our spots. Efrem’s coffees lean into a subtle blue fruit-leather / concord grape profile. They’re very clean and we think play especially well in espresso, which extenuates a nice round body, and coaxes those deep fruit notes to the fore.
INTRODUCING MR. GIRMA ESHETU
ENTREPRENEUR, STORYTELLER (OH, AND FARMER)
Last year Girma’s coffee knocked us off our feet. Last year was Girma’s first time to export, and we grabbed all of it. Both washed and natural.
The first thing that you need to know about the titular Girma Eshetu’s farm is that it’s a touch remote, in the far west of the country. To be fair – the horses were tiny. Still – it’s at least 1.5 hours on horseback from the nearest access road. Luggage comes via donkey, meandering through the Keffa forest. Picture narrow dusty roads, switchbacking through rolling mature forest, with a 150 ft canopy above, complete with the occasional family of Colobus monkeys. You pass seedling nurseries, cross streams, the whole thing. One of the most beautiful coffee settings you can imagine.
Girma’s farm is less an indication of his quality than Girma the man. To be clear, his farm is nothing to shake a stick at. Nice processing equipment, good water management, composting system, plenty of raised-bed drying. It’s just that Girma is a really impressive person. His coffee is exceptional, and he’d never settle for less.
His story starts with ‘Yerges’ the nickname for the popular local beer brand, St. George. In Guji, Girma put himself through university – this first generation of his family to do so. He lands a job in production for the St. George factory. During a career of 30+ years, he rises into management, and pursues his grad degree on the side, for engineering. Moonlighting, Girma starts to design coffee processing equipment, and establishes a company “Girma Eshetu Manufacturing,” his first successful product was a small coffee pulping machine – you’ll see them around Ethiopia – made of cast iron & steel, stamped “G.E.M.” Now fully employed by his own firm, Girma starts hunting for raw materials to lower his production costs – which brings him to the Keffa Zone to buy metals. This is where the story gets serendipitous…
Girma says “I kept seeing people that looked like me.” He never knew where his father’s family was from (he and his mother were relocated to another region of the country after his father died fighting with the military, and his mother never told him much about where he was born). He asked about his grandfather – did anyone know of him here? He meets a woman, who can’t recall the family name, but tells the same story about his grandfather that he had heard as a child. At that point, he says, he knew he wanted to return to his ancestral lands, somehow. Why not grow coffee?
We spent a night with Girma, arriving on horseback about an hour before dark. That evening Ethiopia got its first rain showers in over 4 months. Girma’s son, Natneal, called us Haile Selassie – saying that like Haile, we brought rain in a drought. He was joking of course – but I like the sound of Ras Taylor all the same.
This year, we grabbed all of Girma’s production again, about 380 bags, of that we have close to 70 bags remaining. Cupping results were stellar (complex, floral, bright, juicy kiwi, honey, black tea, bergamot, viscous, molasses) – even as many others in Jimma zone saw frost damage, and fading from accelerated drying with the dry heat. We’ll be visiting Girma again this year when production is in full swing, to see if there are areas in his process that we can improve and to conduct yeast experimentation trials. When you taste Girma’s exceptional coffee, keep in mind this is literally his second harvest – and he’s only getting better!
(excerpt: full-story available here)
In this area of Ethiopia, lower-producing farms are spread out over larger areas, oftentimes overlapping or fully within large swaths of protected forest. Land ownership is an issue here, as estates bring in outsiders but bring roads, jobs, housing and schools. Smallholders are in an interesting position to gain from new laws allowing for more direct export as some of the country’s top cooperatives unite under the new Kata Maduga Union to triple their income over the past two years. In November 2017, we met farmers: new farmers known to customers as Girma Eshetu, Efrem and Kossa Geshe, and to Biftu Gudina, one of the 26 smallholder cooperatives that’s member to Kata Maduga.
In November of 2015, we visited Sumatra origins to identify exporters to work with. Our trip brought us to the doorstep of most major exporters in Sumatra, where we cupped just about everything available. We also visited small projects, met with growers and collectors. Through the cup and ensuing conversations we got to understand regional profiles – to the extent that a designation actually identified a growing region. Past bulk-branded coffees we cupped regional designations and came back with interesting and distinct profiles. Sumatra may have more flavor diversity in its coffees than I’ve experienced anywhere. We tasted many different processing styles almost certainly at the bequest of importers and roasters who assume a fully-washed or honey-process, or natural process coffee will be an improvement. But every time we were presented with the same lot, processed in a variety of ways – the group consensus favored the wet-hulled sample.
(except, full story available here)
As one of the more competitive coffee origins in the world, most purchasing in Ethiopia is done before the first cherries are picked. Buyers get in line come October, for first-ships in January. But, if you go to Ethiopia in May, it’s quite a different place. Coffee trees have already flowered, nodded, and have developed green beans. Washing stations are dormant. The dry mills are still humming, although maybe not at the pace they were in January….and surprisingly, there’s still coffee available. There’s a common misconception about purchasing coffee in Ethiopia that all coffee must come from the ECX. There’s a more complete picture to paint. Although still an oversimplification, coffees will either come from an Exporter that purchases from the ECX, the Coop Unions, or from a private landowner (usually a wealthy Ethiopian, who has a farm and washing station and has set up an out-growers scheme to purchase cherry from his surrounding smallholders).
(excerpt – full story available here)
When people think of coffee from Mexico, they think of Veracruz, Chiapas, Oaxaca, or Puebla. They rarely think of Guerrero, and they do not think of Zihuatanejo, a town along Mexico’s Costa Grande. The farms in Zihuatanejo that we visited are expansive with 26 members covering 400 hectares and 533,000 trees (~1,300 trees/hectare). These farms average 4300-5000 ft above sea-level and are beautiful, “kissed by the ocean’s salty breath,” in the words of farmer Maria Guadalupe Gomez-Anzo. Most coffee from this region has traditionally gone to middlemen who pay little attention to quality, but farmers are well-versed on good agronomic practices. Farmers here roast, cup, and drink their own coffee. Ceasar Galeana Sortiz was the first to produce coffee in Zijuatanejo, and since he has passed on the coffee growth to two generations below him. These farmers have taken an array of environmental initiatives from locating the proper organic inputs for their coffee, to cataloging local flora, attending regional seminars on environmental management, and preparing for a business to bring eco-tourism to the area.
(except – full story available here)
While in Sumatra, the Crop to Cup team visited various sourcing regions to get more traceability and awareness around their coffee production. The Gayo region is like the country western of coffee origins. It has a rugged twang and happens to be full of cowboys. The community cooperation here to combat insect damage in the Sumatran coffee is incredibly valuable. The farmers in the Gayo region are part of the newly formed One Coffee Cooperative. Many farmers in Gayo relocated there after the 2004 tsunami, and when they arrived they received support from the International Migration Organization (IMO) on how to grow, process, and cup specialty coffee. Lingtong in Lake Toba is slightly closer to Medan, and many farmers sell directly to exporters in Medan rather than through the Sumatran middle-men, called ‘Tokehs.’ In Lingtong they are working to connect more smallholder and female farmers directly to exporters. These farmers are Rain Forest Alliance certified, which allows for more traceability of the coffee.
The coffee harvest at the Buhorwa Washing Station in Burundi is unseasonably late this year- the latest it’s been for at least the past 8 years. We hope we’ll be here for at least the first picking, but in the meantime, there is plenty of other work to be done. We have been conducting historical data collection and analysis and creating detailed mapping of the “zone” whose inhabitants and small family farms (about 2,400) contribute coffee to the Buhorwa station. We’re collecting production data from the washing station as well as the headquarters of the Sogestal up in Kayanza. Though we’re only about halfway through, the data is yielding remarkable findings which will help us, the Sogestal, and the farmers, who are most affected by fluctuations in harvest. As we further gather and share this geographical data, we hope it will benefit not only Crop to Cup, but also the Buhorwa station and the local partners- in planning, training, and quality improvement. This is all part of our transparency work.
If you would like more than 8 samples, please contact a trader directly.
