Tasting Notes: Earthy Spices, Molasses, Almond
AAAK Co-op | Region: Highlands, Papua New Guinea | Varietal: Typica (90%), Caturra (10%) | Mill/Washing Station: AAAK Co-op | Importer: Crop to Cup | Processing: Washed | Altitude: 1,400–1,615 MASL
Our average cupping score: 85.75
About the Producers
This coffee comes from the AAK Cooperative, a group of 64 communities across the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Each represents a single-family village, or ‘house-line,’ with its own distinct language and traditions. What unites them is a shared pidgin, Tok Pisin, and membership in AAK—short for Apo, Angra, and Kange, meaning “Unity” in three major local languages.
AAK is the only cooperative in PNG to bring together so many diverse tribes, and they take pride in the role coffee plays in fostering unity.
What makes this coffee stand out
With the exception of a few well-known estates, Papua New Guinea coffee is for the most part made up from smallholder production, all very small scale and very little attention is paid to high quality, specialty production due to the strong involvement of "middlemen". While the 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, and Brian Kuglame, former General Manager of the cooperative, had a large hand in that.
AAK is the only cooperative in PNG to unify so many disparate tribes, and they are proud of the role that coffee plays in promoting unity.
Pour over recipe:
Ratio: 18g coffee, 320g water | Grind: Medium | Water: 198F
0:00 80 g (bloom)
0:30 200 g
1:00 320 g
3:30 Target brew time
