Where's that Microlot Gone?

Sometimes we're asked why we don’t offer the same coffees from one year to the next. There are many factors in play, but there is one in particular we would like to cover.

First, we work hard with a group of coffee producers and exporters to secure the same quality coffee (or better) each year. We seek coffee lots that have had care and attention put into their cultivation and processing by farmers and mills we trust. While we regularly buy from the same people, it doesn’t mean the same lots of coffee are available when we go to buy. And this leads us to an important factor: coffee as a seasonal agricultural product.

No one can be blamed for thinking of coffee as a constant (like Milo is) as every time you go into a supermarket you see the same coffee brands displaying the same coffee offering all year round. In reality, coffee is a variable – climate shifts, different rainfall levels and sunshine hours, regeneration of plant stocks…the list goes on. Coffee production is much like wine, the terroir (a fancy way of saying the special characteristics of the geography, geology and climate of the growing environment), plays a huge role in the outcome of a coffee crop. Changes in the terroir of a coffee farm can mean yields drop, quality diminishes, or conversely things go the other way – bumper yields and quality increases. Either way, this will affect the desirability of coffee from a producer. In the first scenario, our appetite for that particular coffee is reduced and in the second, the availability of the coffee reduces as demand in our line of business follows quality.

So in the end, we must look for the best coffee we can buy from trusted partners when we are in the market to select a new coffee for our menu. In many ways, you could see the changes on our menu as a good sign of fresh crops, a quality focus, and a robust coffee management system.