This blend is a combination of three stellar coffees that can easily stand on their own as single origins: the chocolatey El Carmen from western El Salvador grown by Fernando Alfaro & family; the complex coffee from the AAAK Co-op in Papua New Guinea, and the dynamic Kenyan lot from the Kiranyaga washing station, run by David Waweru and Justus Njanja, pictured front.

FINCA EL CARMEN, EL SALVADOR
This coffee was grown by the Alfaro family on El Carmen Estate in western El Salvador, deep in the Apaneca-Llamatepec mountain range. El Carmen was founded in the middle of the 19th century by Antonio José Alfaro, and it’s been passed down for four generations. It’s now being run by Fernando Alfaro.

AAAK COOPERATIVE, PAPUA NEW GUINEA
The AAK Cooperative is a group of 64 communities from across the Highlands region of Papua New Guinea, a country in Oceania that comprises the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and its offshore islands in Melanesia. Those 64 communities represent 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.

KENYA KIRINYAGA
This dynamic Kenyan coffee comes from the Kirinyaga region, just south of Mount Kenya. It’s a collection of coffees from the Rungeto and Baragwi coffee cooperatives, and was processed at both the Kairu and Kii factories, or washing stations. The Baragwi Farmer Cooperative Society was registered 70 years ago in 1953, and is now the largest cooperative in Kenya - both in the volume of coffee they produce, and also the number of members. Baragwi runs 12 factories for processing all of the coffee that they purchase from their 16,892 members across the Kirinyaga region. This lot was processed at a mill called Kairu, and approximately 1,500 smallholder farmers contributed. The Rungeto Co-op is much newer than Baragwi, having been formed in 1997. Today it has approximately 850 members who process, or turn their coffee fruit into the dried seed that we roast, at their Kii Factory at the foot of Mt. Kenya, and dry the coffee on rasied beds under full sun.