Harvest Update 2021

Climate change has made harvest timing increasingly unpredictable. The 2020 harvest officially started in October in major coffee growing regions but didn’t start in our sourcing areas before early December. The spread between amazing G1 samples was bigger than anticipated, which meant making our first selections towards the end of February. Most of what could happen, happened, and we learned a lot from it. Container shortage, congestion at port, lack of space on vessels, dry-mills overflowing with coffee desperately trying to export paired with constantly changing coffee regulations. Despite the hardship, we successfully exported all our containers by August and have been preparing for the new harvest ever since.

The 2021 rainy season has been less excessive than the previous years, leading to a more uniform maturation of cherry and what seems to be a higher yielding and quality. Farmers have started harvesting in the Yirgacheffe lowlands and in parts of Sidamo and West Arsi. Cherry prices are as high as 38 Birr/kg of cherry compared to 21 Birr/kg in the same period last year. The higher altitudes still have 2-4 weeks to go. We are expecting to see the first high quality samples as early as Mid January.

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