Excitement and Challenges of 2021/22 Coffee Harvest & Sourcing Premium Coffees

New coffee crop season can be very busy, exciting, and sometimes very disappointing time of year. 2021/22 harvest season has been no different but with a whole basket of new challenges to sourcing premium quality coffee.

This year we have seen the commodity coffee prices increase two fold and logistics and shipping of coffee from origin almost grind to a halt in some countries such as Colombia where there has been some serious and lengthy protests and shipping ports have been closed and no coffee was leaving Colombia.

 

Now that I mentioned Colombia we had a very exciting container of coffee on the way to Australia and was due to arrive last month from a project called Spirit Of The Peace.

 

Spirit of the peace is a coffee farm project that focuses on helping ex drug trade participants in Colombia to escape that lifestyle and learn new skills in growing and harvesting premium quality coffee and rebuild their lives outside the drug trade.

 

Very good social project and their coffees were bang on also! However we will not be getting our container from the Spirit of The Peace as they have had a grave incident involving some coop members being murdered by cartels and they have decided to turn back the container of coffee that was purchased by David on our behalf and have it turn back from Singapore to Colombia. This happened due to dramatically increased coffee prices since the coffee container left and the Spirit of The Peace coop was offered more money for that coffee which they needed in light of these events to help pay down their debts.

 

Thanks to David, we were able to resolve that unfortunate situation of losing a container of coffee that was to last us the whole 2021-22 coffee season with another coffee that has just arrived in Australia and I am going to talk more about that new exciting replacement coffee later.

 

When commodity prices of coffee increase, so do the prices of some specialty coffees. The reason why this happens is due to factors such as coffee growing weather conditions that lead to poor harvests, labour shortages, doubling if not tripping costs of fertilisers which no one is talking about by the way and other costs incurred such as moving the coffee cherry from farm to mill and mill to port and so on. These farm input costs have been rising exponentially due to the current brewing energy crisis and rocketing costs of natural gas and oil.

 

Brazil has experienced some really bad frost in certain areas of the country which has heavily impacted the production yield and impacted a lot of coffee farmers lives and livelihoods as well as of course the international coffee prices.

To make the matters worse in Brazil we have been reading reports of lack of rain in parts of Brazil at a very important time of year when the coffee trees are due to start flowering. Without the flower there is no coffee cherry, and without the coffee cherry there is no coffee.

There are also reports of poor flowering coming out of a few African countries such as Burundi.

We are in constant contact with our producing partner Ismael and Romulo to check in to see how they are doing and how their 2022 crop is fairing and what it will potentially look like for next year.

 

Is Our Coffee Still Coming???

As for end of this year, our container of coffee from Ismael (Brazil) is due to dock in Australia this month and we are getting super excited about FRESH CROP coffees from Ismael and Romulo at Sao Silvestre Estate.

 

Now for the replacement coffee that we just received instead of the inbound Colombia from Spirit of The Peace is an exciting coffee from Mexico. This is another exciting coop project that involves 5 producers that deserves its own blog post which we will get to later. This coffee is delicious as well and you will definitely get to taste it in our 2021-22 Mikro Seasonal Blend as well as potentially in our Little Italy blend for 2022 coffee year, as well as a single origin offering at our roastery and online.

 

Stay tuned and keep an eye out for my further emails, keep an eye out on our instagram @mikrocoffeeroasters and you will learn more about our progress and what to expect in coffee year 2022!

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