We are excited to bring to market our most extraordinary PNG offerings to date. Kunjin is a centralized plantation mill that purchases cherry from smallholder farmers in the highlands. With central milling and drying, our partners on the ground control quality at the processing level — day lots are cupped and separated to build our containers and lots which are microlot worthy are processed separately.
Papua New Guinea is an extremely diverse country, with over 800 different languages spoken. Most of the tribes from the highlands didn't have contact with the western world until the 1930s, since early exploration in PNG had been minimal until then. PNG is now a paradox, caught between Western influence and indigenous traditions.
Commercial coffee production started in Papua New Guinea in the 1920s, with seeds brought from Jamaica's Blue Mountain, a Typica variety. At that time, most of the coffee production came from 18 large plantations. Plantations still exist in PNG, but that type of farming only accounts for 15% of the total production; most of the production now comes from smallholders who tend to their "coffee gardens," as they call them locally. The smallholders are subsistence farmers (meaning they live off their land), and they also grow coffee—there are no coffee farmers, per se. Each garden might have anywhere from a couple to a couple hundred trees of coffee, and parchment deliveries can range from 25–65 kg.
Kunjin comes from smallholders between 1400–800 meters, from the Waghi Valley in Western Highlands, in close proximity to the town of Mount Hagen. Coffee is being processed in a leased vintage John Gordon–brand wet mill in an old plantation. Owning a mill or property in PNG is risky, and it could take years to establish a reputation of trust with the local tribes. Even if you make a deal, there is always risk of losing it, as the tribe could simply change their mind on the deal once they see the mill is profitable.
Personally, I'm really excited to work with PNG as a coffee-producing country, being culturally and socially as foreign as it gets. During my first visit in 2012, my luggage was left in Jakarta and I wouldn't get it back until my way out of PNG. I took a cab to Vision City Mega Mall, in the capital city of Port Moresby, and bought a Quicksilver T-shirt for $50 USD—and there weren't many options. The Highlander Hotel in Mount Hagen will run you $300 USD per night with cockroaches in your room, and you might get the suite over the kitchen—good luck sleeping! On the other hand, locals are living off their land with very little income. One of the reasons of such disparity is that there is a big mining boom as we speak, where multinationals are extracting valuable minerals and have brought local prices up as mining is very resource-intensive.
PNG is another one of those countries which has great potential, but it's still far away from hitting its peak. It has heirloom varieties and great altitude, but its social and economic problems makes it extremely hard to achieve top-quality coffee. We are happy, nonetheless, with the quality we are seeing this year, and cleanliness in the cup is one of the biggest attributes for these. As always, we will push the bar for better quality!
— Piero Cristiani
For more information about coffee production in Papua New Guinea, visit our PNG origin page.