Guest Blogger: Jordan Wilkins, We Are Back Home
Most coffee in the world moves fast. Processed, traded, shipped, consumed. But in some places, it still moves slowly. Papua New Guinea is one of those places.
High in the country’s mountainous interior, coffee grows in small garden plots carved into steep valleys. These are not large plantations or industrial estates, but smallholdings tended by families who grow coffee alongside the crops that sustain their daily lives.
Harvest happens by hand. There are no machines moving through rows, no sense of urgency. Just families moving carefully through the trees, selecting cherries one by one — carrying them in bilums (woven bags slung over the shoulder) before walking them down from the slopes.
In places like Marawaka, coffee isn’t separate from life, it moves with it. And one of the most remarkable parts of that process happens by the river.
The River
Once the cherries are harvested, they are brought down to the water. In many coffee-producing countries, processing happens in large concrete facilities — controlled environments designed for efficiency and scale. But in Marawaka, the landscape itself becomes part of the process.
Coffee is pulped using smooth stones from the riverbed and washed in cold mountain water flowing down through the valley. The river runs clear and fast, fed by rain and forested ridges high above. It is the same water the community drinks from and fishes in. The same water that shapes the land over time.
Families gather along the riverbank, pulped coffee moves slowly through the water before being carried away to dry. It is a process that feels natural and unhurried. Intentional in its pace. Deeply connected to the place it comes from.
In most of the coffee world, efficiency is everything. Here, it’s patience.
A Coffee Origin Still Being Discovered
Papua New Guinea remains one of the least understood coffee origins in specialty coffee. The country produces exceptional high-altitude coffees, often grown between 1800 and 2500 metres above sea level in volcanic soils and cool mountain climates. But despite this, many remote valleys like Marawaka remain difficult to access.
Roads can take days to travel. Weather can stop transport entirely. For many farmers, reaching export markets has never been straightforward. And so, for decades, remarkable coffee has been grown in places like this without a clear path to the global specialty market.
But that remoteness has also preserved something rare: coffee that still feels deeply connected to place, that hasn’t been industrialised, that still carries the landscape with it. This is what makes Papua New Guinea feel like one of coffee’s last frontiers.
Not because it hasn’t been discovered. But because it hasn’t yet been fully reached. And even now, it’s still finding its way into the world.
We’re really excited to be working with Back Home on a washed coffee from the Marawaka Valley, Papua New Guinea, with notes of orange, peach, brown sugar and blackcurrant leaf. 100% of their profits go back into supporting the communities they work with, from healthcare to infrastructure, back home in Papua New Guinea.
This coffee is exclusive to our filter coffee subscribers – find out more about subscribing here.
