The country has over one hundred dry and wet coffee mills responsible for processing coffee.
According to the Coffee Industry Corporation’s Acting CEO, Charles Dambui, many of these mills are located in the major coffee-growing provinces of the Highlands Region.
Arikil Coffee is a wet Mill in Jiwaka Province is one such mill that process coffee cherries that is then sold to Goroka where it’s processed to green bean to export overseas.
The Arikil Coffee’s wet Mill is located in Jiwaka Province. The mill processes around 60 to 70 thousand kilos of cherries daily.
The coffee parchments are then transported to Goroka, Eastern Highlands, where it is processed to green beans to export overseas.
Managing Director, Paul Pora who has been in the business for almost six-years said they have shifted to mild arabica coffee where coffee cherries are bought from farmers and dried without processing to export overseas.
Throughout coffee processing, there are three main steps–harvesting, wet milling and dry milling. In Arikil wet mill factory, they are focused on separating the fruit of the coffee cherry from the bean using a pulper.
The beans are then thoroughly washed here in these washing stations. The coffee parchment is then dried, packed and transported to dry mills to process, where the final layer of the bean called the parchment is removed.
Once the parchments are processed, you get the final product, green beans that are now ready to be exported overseas.
Arikil wet mill factory is one of the recipient of the government’s price support incentive who has received K50 thousand to help buy coffee cherry from the farmers at K2 per kilo.
According to the managing director, the price support has help increased the volume of the coffee and has motivated the farmers to produce quality coffee.
