"Welcome to Five Senses Coffee"

In 2000, I landed my first shipment of coffee from PNG into Freo. I was so excited. I remember it well. I’d got Jerry (my friend pictured, who owns the mill in Chuave) to ship me nine 60kg bags of the coffee that I’d especially arranged to buy from him before I left PNG and moved back to Australia. This coffee was going to be part of the genesis of my new life outside of education — the rest is history.

In that particular shipment I was sent eight bags of PSC (Premium Small Holder) ‘A’ and one bag of what Jerry described as a surprise and what I later learned was the sublime PSC AA. Let me explain. The PNG coffee that we get from Jerry comes from literally thousands of village growers. They pick and process the coffee from their few trees each season and carry it down to Jerry’s mill for further processing. As you can imagine, the pre-milled coffee (parchment coffee) arrives in all types of bags and containers and in a huge range of “readiness” for milling. Jerry’s job is to sort through the different coffees into quality lots (using measures of moisture and defect levels) so that he can mill “like” coffees together to achieve a consistent moisture reading and defect level for all the coffee. This results in green coffee graded X. The X grade label indicates a Roy and HG: “all in together boys” result — in other words — beans ranging hugely in size and quality but ready for further sorting.

The PNG A that I organised to buy off Jerry was coffee that is subjected to extra milling. In this process, the processed X grade coffee is further sized and defect sorted which basically results in all the really good beans (about 10%) being taken out of the X grade and being given the esteemed description of PSC A grade. Once the mechanical process is complete, the PSC A is then spread out on large sorting tables and about 20 people give the coffee even further attention — pulling out unworthy beans that managed to slip through the mechanical grading.

And then there was the single bag of AA in the first consignment. For some reason, Jerry had decided to subject the PSC A beans to even more rigorous sorting so he reset the mill and asked it to extract (from the PSC A) all the beans (about 5% of the PSC A) that had seemingly fallen from heaven itself. The result — PSC AA, which on reflection, is a ridiculously inadequate name for such an amazing coffee.

Since that first shipment Jerry has kept a small trickle of PNG PSC AA coming through. Normally we roast it for ourselves and occasionally we’ve had enough to share with others.

Keep your eye on the website for times we make it available. Alternatively, email us and register your interest so that we can let you know when we intend to roast a bit to share.