One of the more surprising facts about coffee is that it isn't actually a bean at all.
Coffee begins its life as the seed inside a small fruit called a coffee cherry. Much like peaches, cherries, and olives, coffee belongs to a family of fruits known as drupes—fruits with flesh surrounding a single seed. That seed is what eventually gets roasted, ground, and brewed into your morning cup.
Once you realize coffee is a fruit, another question naturally follows:
Does that mean coffee has seasons?
It certainly does.
Coffee Doesn't Grow Everywhere
Coffee is believed to have originated in the highlands of Ethiopia, and today it's grown throughout what's known as the Coffee Belt—a band of tropical regions that stretches roughly 25 degrees north and south of the equator.
Unlike crops grown here in the Midwest, coffee grows on small evergreen trees. Every year those trees bloom with fragrant white flowers that eventually become coffee cherries. As the cherries ripen, they turn shades of bright red, yellow, or even orange depending on the variety.
Inside each cherry are the seeds that become coffee.
Like any fruit, those cherries don't all ripen at once. Farmers carefully harvest only the ripe fruit, often making several passes through the same fields over the course of the harvest season.
Why Does My Favorite Coffee Disappear?
One of our guests recently asked us a question we've heard many times over the years.
"I found a coffee I love. Why is it gone when I come back?"
The answer is simple.
Coffee follows harvest seasons.
Unlike wine, where each vintage receives a new label, specialty coffee is constantly rotating as fresh harvests arrive from different parts of the world. When one crop sells out, we often have to wait months for the next harvest to make its journey to us.
That's one of the things we love most about coffee, but it can also be one of the hardest things to explain.
Harvest Is Only the Beginning
Picking the cherries is just the first step.
Once harvested, the coffee cherries must be processed, carefully dried, and allowed to rest before they're ready to travel.
After that, the green coffee is sorted, graded, bagged, shipped to port, loaded onto cargo ships, and transported across the world to importers before eventually making its way to roasters like us.
From the day a coffee cherry is picked until it's roasted here at Hansa, several months may have passed.
It's quite a journey for something we drink nearly every morning.
Fresh Coffee Matters
One thing that makes coffee unique is that the green, unroasted seeds store remarkably well compared to most fruits.
If you pick a strawberry, you have days before it begins to spoil.
Coffee is different.
Properly stored green coffee can maintain excellent quality for many months, allowing producers and importers to supply coffee well beyond harvest season. That's one reason coffee doesn't feel seasonal in quite the same way as peaches or sweet corn.
Even so, green coffee isn't immune to time. As it ages, the vibrant flavors and aromas that make specialty coffee so exciting slowly begin to fade.
That's why we pay close attention to harvest timing and arrival dates when selecting the coffees we roast. We want to roast each coffee while it's expressing the character that made us fall in love with it in the first place.
Sometimes that also means saying goodbye to a favorite until the next harvest arrives.
Every Harvest Tells a Different Story
No two coffee harvests are exactly alike.
Rainfall, sunshine, elevation, soil, temperature, insects, plant health, and countless other factors influence how each crop develops. Even within a single harvest season, the coffee picked at the peak of ripeness may taste slightly different from coffee picked a few weeks earlier or later.
That's part of what makes specialty coffee so fascinating.
Coffee isn't a manufactured product designed to taste identical forever. It's an agricultural crop, and every harvest reflects the growing conditions of that particular year.
Just like wine has vintages and apples have exceptional growing seasons, coffee tells the story of the year that produced it.
It's One More Reason We Love Coffee
Coffee is one of the world's most remarkable agricultural products.
It begins as the seed of a fruit growing thousands of miles away. It passes through the hands of farmers, processors, exporters, importers, roasters, and finally the person brewing it at home.
Every one of those people helps shape what's ultimately in your cup.
The next time your favorite coffee disappears from our shelves, don't think of it as bad news.
Think of it the same way you'd think about any other fruit that's out of season.
The next harvest is already growing, and with it comes another opportunity to discover something new.
After all, one of the best parts of specialty coffee is that there's always another story waiting in the next cup.
