Rare, high-altitude coffee from the roof of the world.
Dirk Collins/Planet 5
Dirk Collins isn’t in the coffee business, per se. He’s a legendary adventure photographer and filmmaker with a career spanning three decades. But that doesn’t mean he can’t help you haul home some of the rarest coffee on earth. In fact that’s just one of the many perks provided by Planet 5 – a multi-faceted “quiet luxury” company he founded in 2024, in part, to help fund mountain preservation.
Speciality coffees, sourced from some of the hardest-to-reach, high-altitude places are an immediate entry point for those eager to join such a journey. The first expression hits shelves this month, packaged under The Everest Coffee Company label. The Nepal Collection is a single-origin release from the Nuwa Estate, grown a mile-high, under the shadow of Mount Everest. It’s never been available before in the US, and offers drinkers a rich roast, with an edge of hazelnut and macadamia. It’s available for purchase at $65 a bag. But he’s hoping for an audience that will buy into much more.
“A traditional brand sells you something, and the relationship usually ends at checkout. We’re building something more interconnected,” explains Collins of Planet 5, which also offers limited edition artwork and one-of-a-kind expeditions to some of the most remote corners of the globe. “Buy the coffee or the art or travel on an expedition and you’re already invested in the mountain it came from, whether you meant to be or not. Each one generates revenue, introduces people to another Planet 5 experience and ultimately supports the people and places at the center of it.”
When it comes to the coffee, that’s quite timely, indeed. Nuwa Estate is in Nuwakot – one of the districts directly affected by the August floods. Communities here are rebuilding and, according to Planet 5, a US market for their coffee is a steady and meaningful income stream, which will help facilitate that process.
We sat down with Collins recently to learn more about these lofty missions, and how coffee is a foundational element of the entire enterprise.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Collins in the field.
Dirk Collins/Planet 5
You’ve spent your career documenting some of the world’s wildest places through film and photography. What made you decide that now was the right moment to build a lifestyle brand around those experiences?
Dirk Collins: “I have been trying to figure out how to do more to protect wild places for a long time. I came to the conclusion that a lifestyle brand offers the opportunity to do this on a greater scale. After thirty years of pointing cameras at some of the wildest places on earth, I realized a picture used to be worth a thousand words, but now it is worth ten thousand footsteps. Every wild place that’s shared has paid a price for being shared. Planet 5 is my solution for helping preserve what remains wild. By putting real capital back into the mountains and their communities, we are providing the best opportunity to preserve the peaks by empowering the people. This isn’t a brand just built around my experiences. It’s a business built to help make sure these places and communities are still here a hundred years from now.”
How is it doing that?
DC: “It means building an economic model where the things people buy and the experiences they have can put money back into the farms, guides, communities and landscapes that make them possible. That’s our version of quiet luxury. It’s not exclusivity for its own sake. It’s having something exceptional and knowing your money is doing real work in the place it came from.”
There are plenty of premium coffee brands already on the market. Why was coffee the right place to begin telling the Planet 5 story?
DC: “Coffee may be the most democratic luxury there is. The world drinks about three billion cups a day, which means it is one of the only premium products where the entry point is already sitting on the world’s table. It’s also deeply personal. Everyone has a ritual around it: how they make it, when they drink it, what those few minutes mean before the day gets loud. Coffee and art have always lived together too. Walk into almost any café and there’s work on the walls. That makes it a natural front door into everything else we do. So a cup of coffee can tell a much larger story. Three billion cups a day. We think that is the largest untapped preservation mechanism on the planet, and it starts with one cup on one counter.”
A Planet 5 Expedition, high in the Himalayas
Dirk Collins
What have you learned about high-altitude coffee production that surprised you, and how does altitude ultimately shape what’s in the cup?
DC: “Altitude does two things at once. It makes the coffee better and it makes every part of growing it harder. The plant gets the benefit. Cool nights slow everything down, so the cherry hangs on the tree months longer than it would in the lowlands. The bean comes out denser, sweeter, brighter. You get less of it per tree, but what you get is better. That is the trade. Everything after that falls on the people. No machinery works on ground that steep. You cannot drive a truck to it. Picking is by hand, and the cherries don’t ripen together, so you go back through the same trees four or five times across a season and take only what’s ready. Then somebody carries that fruit down the hill on their back, and it has to be pulped the same day or the quality is gone. Drying is its own problem. The clouds come in every afternoon, so the beds get covered and uncovered by hand, day after day. These are small family farms. A few acres, almost no equipment, one harvest a year, and a narrow window to get it right. If the weather turns, there is no second attempt until next year. So when people talk about high-altitude coffee like it’s a flavor note, that’s half the story. The mountain gives you the cup. The families do everything else.”
Tell us more about the family behind the inaugural release.
DC: “Our flagship coffee in Nepal is grown by Tashi Tenzing. His grandfather summited Everest with [Sir Edmund] Hillary, and Tashi had traded climbing for growing coffee high in those same valleys. His coffee is not only some of the best in the world but his estate provides an economic engine that keeps remote land, livelihoods and communities intact. The coffee revenues fund schools and health clinics as well as economic opportunities and wildlife corridors. Coffee moves money into the highest, most fragile places on earth more reliably than aid, tourism, or philanthropy ever have. Once you see that, you understand we are not building a coffee company anymore.”
If Planet 5 succeeds beyond your expectations, what lasting impact do you hope it has on the communities and mountain environments that inspired it?
DC: “Three things. The communities are stronger. The mountains are still wild. And people got to be explorers instead of spectators. I want Planet 5 to be the proof: you can build a real business and leave a place better than you found it. Those are not opposing goals, and the companies that matter in the next twenty years are going to have to do both.”
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