Ever felt you would like to do something more meaningful with your life? In 2018, some young Estonians working in management and marketing consulting companies felt that way, too. They left their jobs and stumbled upon a down on its luck tea farm in Georgia (situated between Russia and Turkey). They began by learning about organic tea making and revitalized a forty hectare tea farm. After winning multiple tea awards, this mostly Estonian team handed over the day-to-day duties of running the tea plantations to local Georgians.
To read the whole story of how the tea estates were revitalized, how marketing savvy was applied to sell not only tea online, but also tea bushes and tea gardens, have a look at Renegade Tea's impressive homepage (in English).
The world took notice of this impressive effort. In fact, entrepreneurs from (are you sitting down?) Papua New Guinea contacted the Renegade Tea team.
If one were an entrepreneur from Papua New Guinea, would one not reach out to people in the great coffee capitals of the world—be it Melbourne, Australia (certainly a little closer), Rome, Italy, Vienna, Austria, or if one had affection for Eastern Europe, then Lviv, Ukraine—for help with exporting coffee beans? No, entrepreneurs from Papua New Guinea contacted the head of Renegade Tea, Hannes Sarapuu and asked him to come meet them in Papua New Guinea (PNG) to discuss exporting their coffee beans to Estonia.
Never one to turn down a challenge or get anxious easily, in February, 2025, Sarapuu and a colleague (the colleague had visa problems and discontinued the trip) took the “short trip” to PNG. The village of Gwirot in the region of Daga in PNG is one of the most remote places on earth. It took Sarapuu three days of plane travel and three days of hiking through dense jungle to reach Daga, where twenty to twenty-five tons of coffee beans are grown annually. Coffee beans are grown at an elevation of 1,000 to 1,400 metres. You can read more about his unbelievable hike in the section of the Renegade Beans website titled “The journey to Daga,” especially in the travelogue entry for day six.
Ultimately, the people who reached out to Sarapuu were looking for someone who would establish a sustainable export pathway for their coffee beans, from which all parties could eventually earn a profit.
To give you a sense of the remoteness of the location, Sarapuu was the first ever European to reach Daga. There is no electricity or running water there. But they have a transmission antenna for mobile communications, assuming you can keep your phone charged.
Upon arriving, there was an official welcoming ceremony for Sarapuu by the 200 residents of the village. They asked Sarapuu if he would help bring their coffee beans to market in… (the coffee centre of the known universe) Estonia.
The coffee beans were transported by hand in fifteen to twenty kilogram bags and the trek took two days to bring the beans down from the hills. There was a team of thirty locals bringing down the coffee beans from the mountains.
So Sarapuu and his team were giving it a try. The next challenge was to get the coffee beans off the island. After many false starts, they were able to fly the coffee beans off the mountains in a small plane and down to a larger town.
A Renegade Beans newsletter from June 21st, 2025 stated that the coffee beans had been cleaned, polished, and sorted. The bad news was that the local company that was supposed to help carry out the customs formalities and shipping had declined to help them.
Sarapuu and his team believed they had found another boat for the trip, but more roadblocks (literally) were ahead…
The newsletter from July 15th, 2025 reported that a local coffee bean association was supposed to help get the beans on a ship, but the road they were to travel was a battleground, where two local tribes attacked each other with bows, arrows, and machetes. The battle stemmed from “a dispute between two cousins over a mobile phone,” as reported by Papua New Guinea’s national public broadcaster, NBC. Nine local villagers had been killed.
Hannes and crew are persevering, and they are still working on finding shipping to Estonia for the eight tons of coffee beans…
As the road remained unpassable for a while, this caused another delay in getting the coffee beans down to the port and onto a ship. But Hannes and crew are persevering, and they are still working on finding shipping to Estonia for the eight tons of coffee beans.
My dear reader, after a story like this, would you not walk an extra kilometre (or perhaps 100 km) to taste coffee made from these beans?
To raise funds for this expedition, Renegade Beans pre-sold the beans in Estonia. I know this and have access to their regular updates as my wife was one of their pre-purchasers. If you would like to buy into this adventure, then you too, kind reader, can pre-purchase your Papua New Guinean coffee beans (for delivery in Estonia), by placing your order at renegadebeans.com/collections/frontpage .
Perhaps this story is a long winded way of saying, stick with your day job or the corporate grind! 😉 You never know what may be ahead of you as an entrepreneur.
