Papua New Guinea Shade Dry Experiment Roast and Learn Details

tl;dr: We are running a Roast And Learn Competition during March 2025, and we’re using a super fun shade dried experiment Papua New Guinea coffee which can be found HERE

Our first Roast and Learn of 2025 is kicking off with a Papua New Guinea Mong Extended Shade Dry. This blog post provides the in-depth story with first hand knowledge of the coffee featured this go round. If you’d like to participate in the competition, the details on how to join in are at the end!

Crop to Cup co-founder and Papua New Guinea sourcing lead Taylor Mork wrote the following sourcing report for this very special coffee:

“Showroom Coffee and Crop to Cup Coffee Importers’ 2025 special offer from Papua New Guinea comes from an enterprising producer in the Western Highlands (near the town of Mt. Hagen) named Rex, who operates Mong Coffee.  I visited Papua New Guinea – one of my favorite sourcing origins! – in June 2024, to launch a new quality improvement program with 6 producers across the Western, Central and Eastern Highlands, using our lessons from other origins like Ethiopia and Mexico about drying time and lot separation.  The program reiterated QC basics that often go unheeded by producers in PNG where commercial coffee reigns (with few quality requirements).  These basics include red ripe cherry selection, floating of cherries before processing, raised bed drying and proper lot separation.

Papua New Guinea is a challenging environment for specialty coffee, a) because commercial coffee dominates the industry (there are very few true specialty producers) and b) most coffee farmers grow coffee as secondary income, and they don’t use or treat it as their primary source for income.

On top of the QC basics mentioned earlier, we introduced the slow drying method using raised beds, shade nets and moisture meters. Most farmers in PNG dry their coffee in 3-5 days, but we have been recommending to our suppliers to at least experiment with drying extended to 15-20 days, then see how that affects quality and income at the end of the harvest.  Suggesting a new process on only a small part of their harvest – perhaps cordoning off a small portion of their processing area – allows the producer to try something new without the worry that, if the added effort produces no tangible benefits, or has little, or, worse, adverse effects on quality, only a small portion of the harvest (and their income) would be affected.

The purpose of slow drying is to lower the water activity inside the coffee bean, thus “locking” the moisture and flavor inside the bean, instead of allowing it to deteriorate over time in storage and during the long, often hot, journey from the Lae port to New York.

Slow drying is not an easy practice to take up for any farmer, not just in PNG. It locks up more drying bed space by slowing down how quickly a batch of drying coffee can be removed to make space for the next batch.  It requires funding for raised beds and shade netting, and more labor to turn the coffee regularly over 15 days instead of 5 days, and to track the surface temperature of the drying parchment using a temperature gun.  At Crop to Cup, we support farmers in PNG with both technical guidance and funds for these materials and other tools like temperature guns, Draminski moisture meters (our preferred meter for field use), floating buckets, pulpers, water pumps and more.  In addition, we pay more for these lots.

Rex was the only producer last harvest who made a go at slow drying early enough in the harvest to produce any real volume.  While no scientist would call this a proper data set (coincidences happen!) we were encouraged to find that Rex’s coffees outperformed all other suppliers that year in both the pre-shipment and arrival samples.

This coffee’s January 2025 import arrival cupping yielded an 85 pt cup with vibrant notes of raw honey, dried cherry, milk chocolate, oolong tea and squash.  In comparison, most other PNG lots that arrived around the same time scored 83-84, with more muted flavors.

Rex only produced 45 bags (about 6,000 lbs) of this lot, most of which were contracted by Crop to Cup’s base of longstanding rosters who buy PNG. We hope that featuring this lot on Showroom will allow smaller-volume roasters (both home and professional) to experience this unique lot.

Please send us your feedback after you’ve roasted and cupped the Mong Slow Drying lot. Our partners in PNG always appreciate feedback, and we’ll include your findings in both the quality reports we send and the pre-harvest training we carry out with producers. Positive feedback – if you have it – coupled with the higher prices we pay for winning quality – can be a powerful tool to lead other farmers in PNG to try out these quality practices, which we see as vital for any farmer looking to build a strong specialty coffee business.

Papua New Guinea can produce fantastic, unique coffees, and we feel this is an excellent representation of that!”

The details, rules, and how to join:

• We’ll all be roasting Mong Extended Shade Dry from Papua New Guinea. You must use this coffee to be eligible. Use coupon code ROASTLEARNMARCH for 15% off this coffee at checkout (no quantity limit, orders over 40 pounds ship free in the U.S.).
• While you’re welcome to try as many profiles as you like, each participant is limited to just one submission—so cup everything and choose your favorite!
• You can roast on any machine of your choosing and take any approach you like
• We must receive at least 100g of your roasted coffee by Friday, March 21st 2025. (Ideally, have it in the mail by Monday or Tuesday that week to ensure it’s still fresh by the time we receive it). Remember to label it with your name so we know who roasted it.
• Send your coffee to:
  • Crop to Cup Showroom
    Roast and Learn
    157 11th St
    Brooklyn, NY 11215
• Email your profile (.alog from Artisan preferred or a pdf from Kaffelogic Studio) as an attachment to info@showroomcoffee.com with the subject line “Roast and Learn”. You must submit a roast log to be eligible to win.
• By participating in this Roast and Learn, you agree that if you win (or otherwise have a very unique or unorthodox approach) we may publish your roast profile in an email to Showroom customers (and we’d love to talk to you about your approach, too!).
• Rule #1: Have fun!

We’ll be roasting too — can’t wait to taste your roasts and learn along with you.