Sigri Coffee

One of the highlights of my recent trip to CLTC was the tour of the
Sigri Coffee processing plant. Sigri coffee is the main PNG coffee
that is imported in to New Zealand, and a significant part of most of
the espresso blends I roast. The coffee is well known for it's
acidity particularly if only roasted to a relatively light roast.
This acidity does not suit my palate on it's own, so as a single
origin bean it is not so good, but in a blend it really adds a lot.

The Sigri processing plant is right next door to CLTC and uncle Ross
has a good relationship going with the manager guy there, so we were
able to go there on Saturday afternoon for a coffee cupping session
and a tour of the plant.

First off the coffee cherries get delivered on the back of pickup
trucks or what ever vehicle the growers may have available. Ideally
the cherries would all be red, however this is not always the case as
the pickers get kind of lazy and throw in a bunch of unripe green
cherries too. This is particularly true at the beginning and end of
the season when there are less ripe cherries around.

The cherries are dumped in to a big bin kind of thing and from there
they go through a machine that squeezes the bean out of the cherry.
At this stage the bean is covered in a slimy mucilage that is kind of
sweet.

In PNG most coffee is wet processed, this means that the mucilage is
removed before the bean is dried. In some other coffee growing
countries the beans are dry processed so the beans are just set out
to dry at this stage. For wet processing the beans are put in big
vats and soaked in water for a day before being moved to the next vat
the next day and yet another vat the next day. The number of vats
varies from place to place, but at Sigri they have 3 vats.

After that they are laid out to dry, this is sometimes done on tables
to let air circulate around the beans a bit more, or other times they
are dried on a concrete pad. After the beans are dried (it takes about 7
days I think) they are called parchment, the bean itself is
covered in a layer of silvery coloured stuff that should be removed
prior to roasting.

There can be a variance in the colour of the bean at this stage, as
some were riper than others when they were picked. Ideally they
should be a uniform colour, they fetch a better price that way. So
what they do is put them in some great big conditioning vats. Air is
pumped down to the bottom of the vat then blows back up through the
beans. They are kept in these vats for something like 25 days and
when they come out they are much more uniform in colour, a nice green/
blue colour.

At this stage the beans are sent through a machine that removes all
the sticks and stones that may have made it in to the beans. I can't
remember exactly how that machine worked but it was kind of cool.

Next up they need to remove the parchment from the beans. There are
2 machines that they use to do this, the first one kind of squeezes
the beans to try and get the bean out of the parchment. The second
machine polishes the beans, not too much, you don't want the beans to
be shiny, just enough to clean them up a bit. After they have gone
through those 2 machines they are looking pretty good and are ready
to be sorted and bagged.

The beans are sorted by size, so there are a series of trays with
different sized holes in them and the beans fall through. To stop
the beans from blocking up the holes there are a bunch of balls that
knock any stuck beans back out of the holes. The largest beans are
called AA, followed by A, B, C, maybe D I forget, possibly even some
other low grades, and peaberry. The peaberry are the most rare, they
account for only about 6% or 7% of the crop and are round in shape.
Most coffee cherries have 2 beans, but occasionally they only have 1,
that is when you get the peaberry beans. Peaberry and AA generally
will fetch the best price, and A and B are also reasonably good. In
New Zealand we usually get A and B grades from Sigri.

Once they are sorted in to their sizes there are 2 different ways of
sorting out the good from the bad beans. The first way is usually
used for the cheaper grades like C and D. The beans are put in to
this machine that blows are up from the bottom. The heavier beans
are the better ones and they fall down as the air is not strong
enough to blow them up. They fall in to a sack on the left of the
machine. The lighter beans bounce of the top and are directed to the
right where another jet of stream at a slightly lesser pressure again
blows the lighter beans up and the heavier beans fall in to another
sack. The beans that are still light enough are directed in to a
third sack that is sold to places like Nescafe for their awful
instant coffee stuff.

The better grades of bean are sorted on a rack that vibrates. The
rack is on a slight angle so the heavier beans gradually move to the
one side and the lighter beans to the other.

Once the beans have been sorted they can either be hand sorted to
remove any beans that are black or beans that are deformed, or for
the better grades they are sorted by the coolest machine that they
had there. This machine detected colour differences and when it saw
a black bean it shot a jet of compressed air at the bean, sending it
in to another sack. The beans that made it through the first pass of
this machine were then processed again at a different speed to get
any remaining ones out. Once again the reject beans were bagged up
and sold to Nescafe. After that the beans are all sorted by hand,
mainly to remove any deformed beans and also to catch any black beans
that may have made it through the last step.

If after hand sorting the beans are not up to scratch then they are
resorted by hand again, what a job.

After our tour we went in to the coffee cupping room and sampled 8
different beans. The first 4 had not been processed yet and still
had the parchment on when they were roasted. They all tasted pretty
similar to me, and none of them were all that memorable. Then we had
samples of AA, A, B and Peaberry that had just been processed. The
AA and peaberry were quite different to the A and B beans, they had
noticeably more acidity in them. I actually preferred the A grade
bean, to me it was a bit better balanced so more pleasant by itself
than the other AA and peaberry. In a blend however I think the AA
and peaberry may have more to contribute.

If you have read this far through this posting then I congratulate
you, a lot of people I am sure have stopped long before they get this
far.

Back safe and sound

You can all sleep easy again. I have arrived back in Ukarumpa safe and sound. The trip back was uneventful, the only stops were planned stops to deliver chickens and eggs.

I have a good report on my tour of a coffee processing plant that I will write about later in the week. It was really interesting. I don't have time to write about it at the moment so you will all just have to wait patiently.

Trip to CLTC

Well I thought I would take this opportunity to let you all know what travel is like here in PNG, land of the unexpected.

Earlier in the week I received a phone call from Aunty Alison who lives at CLTC (Christian Leaders Training College), around 7 hours drive from Ukarumpa. A van was coming through from Lae on the way back to CLTC on Friday that I could grab a ride on, so it seemed like a perfect opportunity to see where she lives and see a bit more of PNG.

The van was leaving Lae at around 4am and reached Ukarumpa just before 8am, so I had to leave work early. There were 5 of us in the van, myself, Uncle Ross, another kiwi named Laurie, the driver Thomas and a lady who works in the office at CLTC named Nancy. We took off and all was going well. We drove through Kainantu (not far from Ukarumpa) taking the same route I went on last weekend for the bible dedication.

As we approached the crest of a hill all of a sudden 4 men armed with home made rifles and 2 men with bush knives forced us to stop. This was a new experience to me. It would be exceptionally rare to be held up at gunpoint in New Zealand, and in my year in Canada not once did anything like this happen. So I was a little unsure what they may do. I figured they were probably after money, and I was starting to wish that I had stored some of my money in my shoe like Jonathan has been doing in the Philippines. I thought it would probably be too late to try transferring it at that point so I just sat there in the van and waited to see what would happen. One of the men with a bush knife approached the drivers door and hit it with his knife, not particularly hard, but enough to give the impression that he wanted the driver to wind down the window I guess. The driver had some lunch money stored in the ash tray and was pretty quick to hand that over, I think it was 18 kina (around NZ $9) and amazingly after receiving that money the gunmen took off. So we were let off very lightly and continued on our way, all be it a little shaken from our experience. Apparently the driver had been held up before and he and his son were driven to a village where the vehicle was unloaded and they were stripped naked before being allowed to take the van and leave. I didn't hear about that until later, so I didn't realize at the time just how lightly we had been let off.

A few hours later as we were driving along up a steep mountain pass, we came across a group of people looking over the edge of the road, where there was a 300 metre or so drop. Apparently a bus (one of the PMVs that I was intending on returning to Ukarumpa in) had not negotiated the corner successfully and had flown off the edge. Reports from people at the scene were that they had removed 15 bodies so far, and were still trying to cut others out of the wreckage.

Once again we continued on our journey, until we came across two men armed with shovels who were blocking the road. Apparently they had been filling in a few potholes and then demanding money from travellers in return. Not wanting to be harmed with the shovel, I quickly removed a 2 kina note from my shoe and handed it to the driver who passed it out the window. That seemed to satisfy them and we were allowed to continue yet again.

So we continued yet again until we came across a big truck trailer unit that was blocking half the road. A bunch of people were blocking the other half of the road asking for money. These people didn't even have any shovels, so they were a little more negotiable on price. They wanted 5 kina, instead Laurie told them off in the name of Jesus, and they took that as a fair payment and let us pass.

And that was the last stopage on the journey. Last night I heard that there was a possibility of catching a flight from Hagen to Ukarumpa, Hagen is about 1 hour or so from CLTC. So I left bright and early this morning in a van fill of day old chickens. After waiting at the airport for about an hour I finally found out that there were no flights going to Ukarumpa today so I was out of luck. Instead I spent a rather interesting day delivering chickens and driving around Hagen (I wasn't driving, I was just a passenger). I am heading back to Ukarumpa at 4am Wednesday in the CLTC egg delivery truck. Hopefully we will be too early for the rascalls and we will have a less eventful journey this time.

Sorry I didn't have the prescence of mind to grab my camera and take photos of the gunmen, you will just have to take my word for it that they looked pretty mean.

The Bible Dedication

OK so I am submitting this blog via email, so if the formatting is
kind of odd then that is likely to be the reason.

Right, well on Saturday I went on my first trip outside of the
Ukarumpa mission centre. I was going with a bunch of other people
from Ukarumpa to a bible dedication a couple of hours drive away.
When I say a couple of hours drive away you must realize that I am
talking about a couple of hours on PNG roads away, so it wasn't actually all that far, maybe 100Km or so.

Anyhoo, we all met at 7:30 am and headed out. After about 5 minutes
we had to stop because the radiator hose on the vehicle I was
travelling in blew off. Like all good blokes we all got out and
looked under the hood to see what the problem was. Being the
incredibly handy guy that I am in all situations mechanical, I
decided the most useful role I could play would be the photographer.
Some of the others were more mechanically inclined and quickly found
that the radiator hose was no longer attached and then proceeded to
reattach it making good use of some electrical tape that of course
they had in the back of the vehicle. So after 10 minutes we were
back under way with our patched up radiator hose. Thankfully there were no more car troubles for the rest of the trip.

I recall while in Vancouver complaining a little about the state of
some of the roads and thinking there were quite a few potholes
around. I now look back on those roads and have a good old chuckle
as they were many times better than the roads over here. There were
huge potholes all over the place,

some of them particularly difficult to see amongst the shadows on the road. We were in a pretty decent size 4x4 and still there were several times that I was sure we were
going to do some serious damage to the axle or blow out a tyre. At
one point the road looked barely passable and yet the 2 others that
were with me said that there had been significant improvements on
that part of the road in the last 3 weeks, apparently the road bore
more resemblance to a lake 3 weeks earlier.

Well enough about the roads, I am sure you all want to hear about the
bible dedication. When a new translation of a bible is completed and
printed the tribe who are benefactors of the new translation hold a
bible dedication. I have been told that they vary quite a bit from
tribe to tribe, some of them being pretty solemn and others having
more of a celebratory mood. This one was leaning towards the
celebratory side of things thankfully. People had walked to the
meeting spot from miles around, and there was much singing going on
as we drove along the road.

People were clearly very happy. A number of people were dressed in traditional tribal attire, they generally don't wear this any more but have adopted a more western
style of clothing. When everyone had arrived the ceremony got
underway. The 'White Skins' as we are called were invited to sit
under a blue tarpaulin to the right of the stage, however we managed
to avoid this by moving quickly to a grass bank to the side and
making ourselves comfortable there.

Once the seating arrangements were sorted out there was a drama,
re=enacting the arrival of the white skin missionaries, it was
narrated in the local language so I had to do my best to follow what
was going on by looking. I couldn't really see very well from where
I was so I went for a bit of a walk around the area to see what else
was photo-worthy. There were lots of decorations around, often
comprising of large bunches of bananas with some hibiscus flowers on
them, or in other cases a cabbage hanging on a wire. I guess they
made use of what they had available.

After the drama the speeches began, and they continued for quite some
time. Every now and then I picked up a word or 2 and Steve Curry (my
manager) did a good job of translating what he picked up. It turns
out that the original translation work was begun in 1965. The
translation being dedicated was a revision of the old translation as
the language had changed quite a bit in the last 40 years.

After the speeches we were invited to have lunch so we accepted the
kind offer and joined the other white skins in a nearby classroom for
a lunch of potato, kau-kau, chicken, coleslaw, lettuce, pawpaw and
pineapple. Not bad although the chicken could have done with a
little seasoning.

Food, lodgings and coffee

As those of you who have been regular readers over the last year may remember, while I was in Vancouver I made regular trips to the public market at Granville Island where I could find all manner of fresh fruit and veggies and a wide variety of fish and meat, not to mention the vast array of gourmet cheeses. Add to that the various herbs and grains etc and pretty much 95% of my ingredients could all be found in the often very busy market.


Well the morning market at Ukarumpa is kind of like that except there are only fruit and veggies, and not so many of them. The morning market happens 3 times a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Calling it the morning market in my opinion is not the most appropriate name for it, I prefer to think of it as the pre-morning market. It kicks off at 6:30 and is all over by 8:00, and the later you go the more meager the selection is. On the 3 occasions that I have made it to the market so far I have arrived at around 7:00 and there has been quite a good variety of produce for sale. There are pineapple, bananas, strawberries, some other berry looking things, bell peppers (capsicums), potatoes, sweet potatoes, broccoli, beans, lettuce, vanilla beans, and the list could go on. The prices are often ridiculously cheap, yesterday I managed to score a bunch of bananas for around US $0.50 and they have been pretty tasty so far. Then there were the vanilla beans, 4 for US$0.30, not bad at all considering I spent around $9 for 2 of them in New Zealand last month. Instead of listing all of the items and their prices I will include a picture, everything in that picture was purchased for about US$3.00, not bad at all. On my first trip to the market I was looking for garlic, and was rather surprised when someone pointed it out at one of the tables. It was tiny, the whole bulb was about the size of a regular single clove. I bought some and used it a few times, I found it ridiculously painful to work with. Each clove was not much larger than a grain of rice once it was peeled. I ended up buying a jar of minced garlic from the store, much easier to work with.



Well enough about food for now, a number of people have expressed an interest in what my living arrangements are like. They are pretty nice. I have hot water available thanks to the solar panels on the roof, so I can still enjoy hot showers. The house is a duplex, with the other half of the house currently unoccupied. My half is the half on the right in the photo. Yesterday my flatmate arrived, his name is Ron I think. He is from Canada, Labrador I believe. His accent is quite different to the few Canadians I met in Vancouver, but I can normally understand him alright. He is a physio and is here for 6 weeks before heading to New Zealand for a couple of weeks. He is then going to Singapore or Taiwan, I forget, for a wedding, before eventually heading back to Canada for his own wedding in December. Any way back to the house, um, it has wooden floors, white walls and white ceilings. There is a kitchen with a rather scary gas oven, I am yet to figure out how to turn the oven on, some other gas ovens I have seen around Ukarumpa have to be started by using a long match. There is a starter button on the oven, but as yet pressing it has not achieved anything and the smell of gas filling the kitchen has prompted me to turn the gas off again before a random spark leaves me without any eyebrows. The lounge has a rather uncomfortable couch and 2 equally uncomfortable armchairs. There is also a table with 4 chairs. My bedroom has a double bed, a small desk with chair and an empty bookcase. If anyone has any further questions regarding the house feel free to leave a question, or if you prefer your questions to be private then send me an email.


A few people have also asked what the coffee situation is like here. Well, for the first few days it was particularly tough as I had no way of making any coffee. However someone I had lunch with on Saturday came to my rescue and found a spare french press that I can borrow for the time I am here. That alleviated the problem to some extent, now the only problem is I have no coffee grinder. I will have to keep a lookout for a cheap grinder somewhere, maybe the store will have one soon (it is pretty variable what the store actually has in stock). Anyway, I was given a bag of pre-ground coffee, PNG Blue Mountain. The beans taste kind of odd, I haven't quite been able to figure out exactly what it is that was odd about it that is odd, they are not really nasty tasting, just odd. Considering they were roasted in April I would have to say they are not too bad, and they may have actually been quite nice when they were fresh. There is a coffee research centre just outside of the village, I passed it on my way here from the airstrip, so I will have to pay a visit there some time.


There seems to be an abundance of very small wildlife around my house, particularly wildlife of the type that like to spin webs. I happened to look a little closer at one the other day and noticed that it had what looks like a big shell on it's back. I have since seen a few more of these around the exterior of the house, they look kind of cool so I took a photo.