Back in 2024, we travelled to Papua New Guinea. It’s a country that’s stayed with us since.

The way coffee is grown there feels inherently different to most other origins. Everything is more remote, more manual, more dependent on people and place. But it also comes with real challenges. Infrastructure is limited, logistics are tough, and tribal conflict can cause serious disruption. Getting coffee out of the country is far from straightforward.

Not long after that trip, I received a message from Jordan, the founder of Back Home.

Jordan is half Papua New Guinean, half British, with deep family ties to the mountain ranges that run through the spine of the country. We spoke at length about PNG, our trip, and the realities of producing coffee there, as well as what it might look like to build something that genuinely works for the communities involved.

His aim was clear, to connect PNG producers with specialty roasters around the world in a way that puts more value back into the hands of farmers and brings more attention to coffee from the country. The passion was obvious, but if I’m honest, I wasn’t sure it would ever become reality. I’d seen it first hand. Producing, harvesting, transporting and exporting coffee from PNG is incredibly tough.

Then on Friday 30th January 2026, nearly two years later, I received a message out of the blue.

“Hey Ole, just wanted to let you know the PNG coffee finally made it over to the UK. It’s been an epic journey, we’ve had to navigate tribal conflict and international shipping haha. It was quite an emotional moment seeing it in person as you can imagine.”

Alongside it were photos and videos of his coffee sitting in a warehouse in the UK. After everything it had taken to get there, it felt like a huge achievement.

We jumped on the phone straight away and talked through the whole journey. It had been a long process, working through difficult terrain, delays, and challenges at every stage. I jumped at the chance to buy what we could from that first lot.

Back Home is exactly that, a return to where it all started.

For Jordan, Papua New Guinea is more than an origin. It’s a place of family, heritage and responsibility - somewhere that holds real weight, even from the other side of the world. You get the sense that his centre of gravity has always been there.

Marawaka sits within that story. It’s a place where coffee is part of everyday life, grown in small garden plots, picked by hand, and processed in ways that haven’t really changed over time. Farming is done by smallholder families, often on tiny parcels of land, high up in the mountains and surrounded by rainforest.

That way of working shows in the cup. It’s a coffee shaped by its environment and the people behind it, with real character, complexity and sweetness. It’s one of our favourite coffees we’ve had through the roastery, made even more special when you understand the journey behind it.

We’ve got a small amount from this first shipment, and once it’s gone, it’s gone. This is a genuinely special coffee, and not one to miss.