Meta Coffee Lab Papua New Guinea Peno Lufa and Okapa District

It has been close to 3 years since I’ve had Meta Coffee Lab coffee and we’re changing that this morning! I have a fresh new Papua New Guinea selection to get this week started right! Slurp…

Meta Coffee Lab

Purchase this coffee directly for $17/12oz

Lincoln Journal Star article

META COFFEE LAB PAPUA NEW GUINEA PENO LUFA AND OKAPA DISTRICT

I can’t believe it has been nearly three years since my last taste of Meta Coffee Lab coffee, but time flies when you’re having fun! That is definitely true! Since I last featured this Lincoln, Nebraska roaster, Mike Bratty and his wife, Suzanne Seberg, have expanded their home-based operation as well as redesigned their coffee packaging from standard brown craft bags to spiffy looking zipper bags with subtle coffee-related black on charcoal dark plum print and pops of color patterns in the side panels. Very sharp! Mike and Suzanne both have full time jobs, but Meta Coffee Lab has grown to take over their basement and they appear to have come a long way since their days of riding their custom cold-brew nitro bike almost an hour to the farmers’ market every weekend (although they may still be doing that, too!).

This morning’s coffee is Meta Coffee Lab’s microlot from Papua New Guinea. This is a microlot from the Eastern Highlands of PNG, containing coffees that grow in the Namugo rainforest. Namugo has a diverse microclimate environment, so I’m sure it’s not unlike Colombia, where coffees growing just a mile or two from one another can be completely different! Coffee cherry is brought to a central mill where it is processed, sorted and well-stored before being shipped. Microlots of special coffees is relatively unheard of in PNG, but Cafe Imports has been working closely with some of the mills to begin handling them. This particular coffee comes from Peno Kavori, who owns a milling facility in the Lufa district. He makes regular trips into Lufa and Okapa to buy coffee. This lot is a washed coffee, grown at 1400-2000masl.

I’m using a relatively new setup for brewing that is, so far, working out great! It’s a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin pourover brewer that uses Kalita 155 filters. I am using the silicone blockers to block all but three of the holes in the flat bottom of the brewer. My grinder is a Knock Aergrind and with a 30 second bloom I am getting total brew times of about 3:00 or just under that.

This coffee has a big presence in my mouth, with a medium-heavy body and a lot of intense flavor right out of the gate with the first sip. I get honey-like sweetness with a big, citrusy, but round and sweet brightness right in the front of the sip. There’s a savory component in this coffee that hits the back of my tongue, too, and I almost get that tomato vibe from it that is more common in some Kenyan coffees. I wouldn’t quite call this one tomato-y, but it’s really close and there is definitely a savory, slightly umami note to this cup which is unusual and adds a very unique dimension to the drinking experience. The citrus component is hard to quantify for me. It’s fairly bright and does a good job balancing the big sweetness of the cup, but the type of citrus isn’t obvious. It’s not clearly lemon, lime, orange, grapefruit, etc, but it’s definitely a citrus acidity with that bit of savory attached to it. It reminds me most of orange juice because even though it’s citrusy and bright, it’s also round and seems sweet to me. On the bag, Meta Coffee Lab uses “cascade hops” as a descriptor and I see where they get that. Widely used in craft brewing here in the US, Cascade gives a citrusy, bitter, but also floral note to the beers they are in. That citrus component that dominates most of the flavors in this cup has a bit of floral note to it, too. And for as sweet as this coffee is, it has a slight bitterness that rides into the finish and gives a slightly dry, clean, palate-cleansing aftertaste. In the cooling cup there is a chocolate note that is creeping up as the citrus is tempered a little, and, overall, this is a juicy coffee that just begs for bigger and bigger sips. I’m almost done and I feel like I just got started!