The coffee harvest calendar: who is picking, and when

In short

Every origin in the atlas picks within a window of a few months, set by which side of the equator it sits on and how high its farms are. Laid out month by month the year is never empty, but it is far from even — and the date a cherry is picked is not the date the coffee reaches anyone.

Somewhere in the world, coffee is being picked today. Across the 38 origins in this atlas there is no empty month in the year — but that continuity is an accident of geography rather than a plan, and it hides how narrow any single country's window really is.

Most origins pick for three to five months and spend the rest of the year growing the next crop. Which months depends on two things: which side of the equator the farms are on, and how far up the hill they sit.

The calendar

Each row is a month and the origins harvesting in it. An origin appears in every month of its own window, so the counts add up to far more than 38.

The year is not evenly loaded

December is the busiest month in the table, with 25 origins picking at once. April is the thinnest, at 9. That is a swing of 16 countries between the fullest month and the emptiest, and it is not random.

The northern-hemisphere growers — most of Central America, the Ethiopian highlands, much of Asia — pick through the back end of the calendar and into the new year. The southern ones run half a year out of phase. The quiet stretch is the gap between the two, when the north has finished and the south has not started, and it is the part of the year when a roaster's offer list is least likely to change.

A handful of origins set the rhythm

Brazil alone is about 35% of the world crop, and it picks from May to September. The five largest origins together are roughly 73% of it: Brazil, Vietnam, Colombia, Indonesia, and Ethiopia.

This is why the calendar matters commercially even though the table treats every country as one row. A month with many small origins in it and a month containing Brazil are not comparable events. Green-coffee pricing, shipping capacity and the whole trade's attention move on the big windows; the rest of the table is where the interesting coffee tends to be.

Altitude moves the date

A country is not a harvest window; it is a stack of them. Ethiopia grows coffee between 1500 and 2200 metres, and cherries at the top of that range ripen weeks behind the bottom. The window in the table above is the union of every farm in the country, not the schedule of any one of them.

The practical consequence: a single-farm lot and a country's harvest window can disagree by a month in either direction without either being wrong. Higher usually means later, and it usually also means denser beans — which is why altitude ends up quoted on bags as a proxy for quality, doing a job it only half does.

What a harvest date does not tell you

It does not tell you when the coffee is drinkable. Picking is the first step of several: the cherry has to be pulped or dried, the parchment has to rest, the lot has to be milled, graded, sold, containerised and shipped. Two to four months between the pick and arrival at a roaster in another hemisphere is ordinary, and longer is common.

So "fresh crop" on a bag is not a claim about last month. It usually means the most recent harvest to have completed that journey, which for a distant origin can be most of a year after the cherries came off the tree. The date worth having is the roast date, and after that the harvest year — in that order.

Nor is any of this a forecast. These windows are typical, and a harvest is a weather event: rain at the wrong moment moves flowering, and flowering moves everything downstream of it. Treat the table as the shape of a normal year rather than a schedule for this one, and read each origin's own page for what makes its crop unusual.