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Coffee
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Everything Else
Here it is, our current release schedule. This chart represents our best guess at when coffee we have agreed to purchase will be released.
Please bear in mind that plans regularly get derailed despite our very best efforts - so we really can't guarantee anything. Still, we'll keep this updated so that you'll also have as much of an idea as we do and hopefully this will help with your planning too.
Here are a few points to bear in mind when using the schedule.
This will tell you the country of origin for a particular lot, as well as general information about processing (i.e. washed, honey, natural etc). We won't be able to give more specific details about the lot until we actually release the coffee. If you see the letters 'SR' here, this will likely be a special release (more info here).
On the sea means that the coffee is on its way to the UK from the country of origin. It will need to complete its journey, pass through various customs and quality checks before making its way to a specialist warehouse near to the port.
This means that the coffee is now available to us. We'll usually arrange for a freight company to pick up coffee for us and deliver it to Cutlery Works. This usually takes a couple of days from us making the arrangements to taking delivery of the green coffee.
This means that we are beginning the process of figuring out how to roast the beans. This part can take anywhere between 10 days and 4 weeks. It really does depend on many factors.
We're getting to know the coffee and how it reacts in the roaster. We then need to wait for the coffee to rest before we can subject it to various testing protocols. Only when we are fully satisfied will we release the coffee.
This part of the process can take up to a couple of weeks. We need to allow the coffee to rest before running a whole series tests to make sure everything is as it should be.
We'll update this date whenever we are able to. Please be aware that we won't hit the exact date, and the chances are that this date will move back and forwards a fair bit - there are just so many things that can happen along the way. We'll try our best to make sure that this date is always our best guess. If you see a letter 'C' after that date, this means that the release date is confirmed.
It might also be helpful to know that we generally try to buy enough coffee to last us for three months (with only a handful of exceptions each year). This is because coffee tastes better when fresh and we want to take advantage of that and embrace seasonality. We get just as excited about fresh coffee as you do, which is why last year we purchased around 30 lots in total.
So, even if you miss out on the release, you'll have plenty of opportunities to get hold of the coffee before it sells out.
Every once in a while we'll buy some spectacular tiny lot, which could be gone within a month. Those lots will be offered to people that are signed up to our email newsletter first. You can find out more about that in the link above or just sign up here and you'll be among the first to know!