Bittersweet, Roasted walnut, guava, caramel, dusty cocoa powder
The Baroida Plantation, located in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, was founded by Ben Colbran in the 1960s. Ben first purchased the land from a man named Taro and they were amongst the first people to cultivate crops in these valleys. In 1965, the government encouraged the early settlers to start growing coffee as a long-term sustainable crop. Ben started to plant coffee trees becoming one of the first coffee producers of the Eastern Highlands
The Colbran Family is now in its third generation with Ben’s son Nichol and grandson Chris running Baroida plantation. Through either luck or good design, the Baroida plantation sits at the apex of the Lamari river valley and Mount Jabarra range. The plantation itself is at about 1700 meters amongst thousands of hectares of cleared land with former colonial coffee estates surrounding them (now run by native landowners) and flanked by mountains (up to 2300 meters) filled with small holder coffee producers.
This is a honey process lot, which is somewhere in between wet process and fully “natural” (dry process). The cherry is pulped from the seed, but instead of removing the fruit through fermentation, the coffee is laid to dry with that mucilage intact until the green seed within reaches a moisture level of around 11%. This honey process lot is bodied and sweet, and retains a nice level of tangy acidity. Honey process coffees tend to produce a fair amount of chaff when roasting which is something to keep in mind if roasting on a machine with exposed heating elements like the Behmor, or running back to back batches.
Bean Spec:
- Origin: Papua New Guinea
- Region: Eastern Highland, Baroida, Aiyura, Kianantu District
- Farm: Baroida Plantation
- Producer: Colbran Family
- Altitude: 1700m
- Cultivar: Arusha, Bourbon, Mundu Novo, Typica
- Processing: Honey process
- Sourcing: Sweet Maria’s