Producer: AAK Cooperative
Farm: 1,698 Smallholders
Region: Highlands
Altitude: 1,400-1,615 masl | 4,593-5,299 feet
Varietal: Bourbon, Typica, Caturra, Catuaí, Arusha
Process: Washed
Roast: Light
Notes: Nougat, Black Cherry, Cedar

Imported by our friends at Crop to Cup.

"Brian Kuglame is the General Manager of the AAK Cooperative, a group of 64 communities from across the Highlands region. That’s 64 different ‘house-lines’—single-family villages each with languages and traditions uniquely their own. What they have in common is a pidgin called Tok Pisin, and membership in the AAK Cooperative. AAK stands for Apo, Angra and Kange—the word for ‘Unity’ in the three major local languages. Coffee brings the world together in more ways than one. 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.

"With the exception of a few well-known estates, Papua New Guinea coffee is for the most part from smallholder production, all very small scale with little attention paid to specialty production due to the involvement of middlemen. While middlemen play a valuable role in bringing the coffee economy to remote areas up in the mountains, they complicate quality promotion between buyer and seller.

"With so many disparate cultural groups and languages across the Highlands, PNG culture has traditionally 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."