The Coffee Harvest Calendar

Coffee is harvested once or, in some regions, twice per year. The timing follows latitude, altitude, and rainfall pattern rather than any fixed season: when the Northern Hemisphere's Central American harvest concludes in spring, harvests in Brazil and Indonesia are beginning. At any point in the year, somewhere, coffee is being picked.

Cherries on a single tree do not ripen together. Selective harvesting — picking only fully ripe cherries by hand, in repeated passes over weeks — is one of the principal determinants of quality in the green coffee that follows.

The character of a given lot is set long before roasting. Cultivar, altitude, soil, climate, and processing method together establish what the green coffee can become; the roast develops that potential but cannot add to it.

The calendars below chart harvest periods by region across Africa, the Americas, and Asia-Pacific. Fresh-crop arrival follows harvest by roughly three to six months; the interval required for drying, milling, export, and transit.

Bookend Roasting purchases by harvest, not by inventory cycle. Each lot is selected when its region's crop lands, roasted while the green coffee is at its best, and retired when the lot is exhausted. The catalog changes because the harvest calendar does.