As my coffee geekery has no bounds I have compiled these tables for my own use, so that I can remind myself when to expect particular coffees to be available here in the UK. Obviously people involved in coffee professionally probably know these things but I thought it may be of interest to a couple of other people. The inimitable Sweet Maria’s have a more complex table showing the full harvest period, the best harvest period, the full shipping period and the nest shipping period. I have used this alongside Mercanta’s loose reporting of when they expect particular countries’ harvests to arrive (cos Mercanta source a vast chunk of the [good] coffee that comes into the UK). I’m presuming things take quite a long time, so the periods listed here align with the ends of Sweet Maria’s periods. This sort of matches up with how the Cup of Excellence country programmes function too.
Country | Harvest | Arrival in UK |
Brazil | September | October-April |
Colombia | November-December & May-June | January-February & July-August |
Costa Rica | March | April-July |
Guatemala | December-March | April-July |
Honduras | February | March-June |
Nicaragua | March | April-July |
El Salvador | March | May-August |
Ethiopia | November-February | April-August |
Kenya | February | April (possibly more in September from a ‘Fly Crop’) |
Rwanda | October | December-January |
Dominican Republic | February-April (long season) | April-August |
Panama (for those who’re lucky!) | March | April-June |
This table shows the most likely times for coffee to be arriving from the respective country.
Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | June | July | Aug | Sept | Oct | Nov | Dec | |
Bolivia | X | X | X | |||||||||
Brazil | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | |||||
Colombia | X | X | X | X | ||||||||
Costa Rica | X | X | X | X | ||||||||
Dominican Republic | X | X | ||||||||||
El Salvador | X | X | X | X | ||||||||
Ethiopia | X | X | X | X | ||||||||
Gautemala | X | X | X | X | ||||||||
Honduras | X | X | ||||||||||
Kenya | X | X | X | X | ||||||||
Nicaragua | X | X | X | X | ||||||||
Panama | X | X | X | X | X | |||||||
Rwanda | X | X |