Papua New Guinea Dry Process Baroida

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 dry process lot (also referred to as, "natural"), where the whole coffee cherry is laid to dry on raised beds until the green seed within reaches a moisture level of around 11%. That tends to take around 30 days. In that time, the cherries ferment, and often impart fruit flavors in the cup. This coffee was fruited in both light and dark roasts, even winey. It also produced 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.