Foundation Coffee Roasters
Foundation coffee roasters are an independent roastery and equipment supplier based in St Ives, Cornwall.
They began their coffee journey with a mission to create quality and high-grade speciality coffee while at the same time using the best possible ethical practices that have a minimal impact on the environment.
This transcends from the sustainable relationships they build at source all the way through to the Omni-degradable and home compostable coffee bags that they showcase their coffee.
Foundation focus on honesty and transparency throughout their business - two things that we hold extremely important too. Their involvement at origin stems from these two ethics as they prefer to deal with coffee farms and mills directly.
It is a super important step that more and more roasters across the world are making. Although it is hard and requires time and money, there is no substituting the value that is gained when you can see exactly where the coffee is coming from, speak to the people that grow it and nurture sustainable long-lasting relationships.
All of this knowledge can then be passed onto the consumers to better educate them on the issues in coffee-growing regions of the world.
The work that is put into their sustainable sourcing of coffee is carried into their local community in St Ives where they participate in the community orchard - donating the chaff (a byproduct of coffee roasting) to help mulch the fledgeling apple trees. They also send coffee grounds to the New yard restaurant to use in their walled garden.
The Coffee
The Arokara AA Coffee from Foundation Coffee Roasters originates from the Arokara Cooperative in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea where the coop operates a few of the local plantations, Tairora and Gadsup being the largest.
These plantations were originally set up with modern farming methods by the Rural Development Bank. In the last 10 to 15 years, the plantations have been returned to the ownership and management of their original landowner groups, who do not use any chemicals or fertilizers in the production process.
Coffee is handpicked by the farmers (or clan, as they’re called locally) and then pulped on the same day and fermented in cement vats for 36 hours.
After the fermentation process, the coffee is washed with fresh mountain stream water from the nearby Aru River and then sun-dried until it reaches the even blueish colour that coffees from the area are known for. The drying process can take between seven and 12 days depending on the climate.
Workers who perform the processing come from the surrounding villages. The co-op employs between 20 and 60 people during the year, depending on the season (those numbers do not include the clan cherry pickers). In the surrounding community, between 10,000 and 12,000 people depend on coffee exporting for income.
Coffees from Papua New Guinea are revered for their interesting acidity and high variety. The country itself is unique in its mountainous topography and the incredible cultural diversity of its thousands of indigenous tribes.
Historical changes in infrastructure have reduced the number of centralized coffee plantations; thus, many Papua New Guinea plantations are actually collections of traditional “coffee gardens,” or small plots of as few as 20 plants grown alongside subsistence crops. With an increased introduction of updated processing methods, these already-incredible coffees continue to develop in quality and consistency.
The Review
The Arokara from Foundation was a coffee I was super excited to try. I’m always pretty excitable when I taste a new coffee anyway but having tasted a few coffees from these guys before, they know what they’re doing, plus a Coffee from Papua New Guinea is relatively rare.
The initial fragrance when opening the box was fairly rich, there was certainly dark chocolate and undertones of something sweet.
The first few sips as expected were full of the delicious dark chocolatey body, there were a couple of dark fruits notes that squeezed juicy flavours towards the back of the palette.
The coffee had a medium mouthfeel edging towards heavy which really works with the darker flavour profile. This is not only testament to the brilliant farmers at source but also the roasting, Foundation highlight these notes by roasting to a particular profile.
Prunes layer within the dark chocolate in the middle of the sip, combining with the buttery body makes a really enjoyable drinking experience. It reminded me a little bit of protein balls that you often find in speciality coffee shops.
The coffee cools into a slightly lighter body that invites delicate notes of cherry into the aftertaste.
I would definitely recommend cupping the coffee to see if you can put your finger on the various notes. Heavier bodied coffees like this work really well in methods that filter the coffee through a metallic filter (espresso, stovetop or cafetiere) they add to the body because they contain certain oils that are otherwise filtered out with paper. The Arokara, however, worked really well across the board of methods. Pourover methods highlighted the delicate cherry notes at the end as the coffee cools.