Guats’ Up
Firstly I wanted to start by saying a great big Strangers thank you to all our amazing customers, near and far, for supporting us through these incredibly crazy, testing times. Without you all we certainly wouldn’t make it through, so thank you so much.
The coronavirus has caused a huge number of problems across all areas of life and the coffee industry is of course not left unaffected. The forced closure of so many businesses and the fact that people are made to stay home, starve us of the daily retail footfall, making it essential for us to quickly adapt to survive.
We’ve unfortunately had to reduce our opening times, staff numbers, and can only offer takeaway for the foreseeable but I’m thankful to still be open and hopefully give a drop of normality to people in these mad times we face.
Changes in how we run our shops are not the only adaptations we’ve had to make this past year. Buying coffee, predicting volumes, and stock management probably has never been so complicated.
Customer flow, both wholesale and retail, are just so unpredictable, one minute everyone is open and people are walking around shopping and the next it’s like a ghost town.
The knock-on effect of this drastic ebb and flow is our production rates go up and down radically. Our coffee requirements change massively week to week, so basically guessing how much coffee you’re going to need for a whole year is going to be nigh on impossible.
To give a little insight into buying coffee, crops from different countries arrive in the UK at different times of the year. When the harvest lands, we taste different lots, and reserve stock of each we like, to draw down on throughout the year until the next year's crops arrive.
Now there is a problem with buying like this, you have to be pretty good at guessing what coffee you need! Too much or too little coffee on reserve, both bring there own problems, so you’ve got to try and get it right! This is a shared problem too, importers, farmers, also are playing the same guessing game with no real idea of what coffee will be required in the UK in the next year!
With all that being said this brings me to the main point of my post, over the next few months we will see some supply issues, with certain coffees running out of stock in the UK.
For us, it’s our Guatemalan offering which is likely to be all gone before the new harvests arrive in the next few months. We hope to be cupping new seasons samples of both washed and natural processed Guatemalan coffee by April. So if you are a fan of this coffee, I can only apologise and hope you see this as an ideal opportunity to try a different origin of coffee and like me, eagerly await the arrival of this years ‘Guat’ crop which I’m sure will bring some unusual and exciting lots.
In the meantime why not try our Colombian Campo Santo, which is a well balanced, full-bodied coffee, works well for filter or espresso. Or if you fancy something a bit brighter try our Mustefa Aberkeno, washed organic Ethiopian coffee, loads of apricot jam and black tea flavours coming through in the cup.