coffee shortage

you may have seen where the blocked suez canal is creating a coffee shortage. It is...but only in Europe.

you may have seen where the container shortage is creating a coffee shortage. it sure is!

so globally, coffee supplies are fine. there's no shortage, no lack of quality, nothing to worry about. but logistically, we can't seem to get coffee into the usa. there's a shortage of shipping containers, a shortage of ships, a shortage of labor at the ports, at customs, at the warehouses, at the trucking companies. there's truly a massive shortage of fresh specialty coffee in the usa right now. almost every importer we work with has nothing left but past crop old coffee for sale.

we aren't going to raise prices yet, but most roasters will. we aren't going to run out of coffee (we saw this coming and stocked up) but most roasters could. we aren't going to have too many new varieties for a while, but we are working on that. we aren't going to compromise on quality -- we've built up our brand name too much to spoil it now. march was a new sales record, and almost every month is, but i'd get sad if it wasn't. if we stopped breaking records every month i'd get bored and wander off to a new venture.

central american coffees are sitting at the ports waiting for a ship to pick them up. they are very late arriving this year. we have a lot of contacts lined up for microlots from mexico, costa rica, honduras, el salvador; and over in africa we already have our name on coffees from ethiopia, but that's months away from getting here.

running out of coffee is just another consequence of how the world is right now. be patient. we've got the good stuff coming, but it's all going to get here later than normal.