Buddys Tasting notes: Orange marmalade, herbal, creamy
 
 
Goroka, the closest urban center to Bena Coffee Farm, is one of the main highland towns on the westbound Highlands Highway—the rugged, and only, official route connecting the East coast of Papua New Guinea (PNG) and its industrial port of Lae with the island’s central rainforests. Goroka is a small trading city erected in an oval around its central airstrip. It is also the industrial center to a significant portion of the country’s coffee consolidation and upstream purchasing. From its earliest introduction to present day, the arabica gene stock in the Eastern Highlands is considered to be one of PNG’s strongest natural assets, not to mention one of the best-preserved typica lineage variety sets in the world. And these delicate genetics clearly thrive in the country’s highlands, which are some of the most virgin and fertile on the planet.
Between World Wars I and II, Australian settlers would establish more and more large coffee estates in the Eastern Highlands.  As commercial exports ramped up, more indigenous Papuans would adopt coffee as a cash crop alongside their traditional economies, in most cases processing at home and selling humid parchment to traveling collectors. For hundreds of thousands of rural farmers coffee would be, and still is, the very first and only source of western currency.
To this day expert-level cultivation knowledge largely remains in the possession and experience of PNG’s plantation owners. Remote smallholder coffee tends to fall short of its potential, receiving only scarce quality interventions from ambitious millers and exporters. And, in this case, larger landowners.  Bena Coffee Farm, about ten miles Southeast of Goroka, is a hybrid model for PNG: a 33 hectare private estate whose coffee is sub-divided into individual family-run plots for direct management, many of which have been cared for by the same family for two generations.