A regular asked last week why the Guatemala had been off the shelf, and the honest answer is: it spent most of April in a steel box on a dock in Long Beach. I want to write that down, because the gap between "we roast it fresh every week" and "where the green coffee actually comes from" is wider than most café chalkboards let on.
Green coffee — unroasted, the raw bean — travels by sea in jute bags packed into shipping containers. From a washing station in the Guatemalan highlands it goes by truck to a port, onto a ship, across an ocean, through customs, onto another truck, and finally to an importer's warehouse where we buy it a few bags at a time. Every one of those steps is a place it can wait. This time it waited three weeks at the port for reasons nobody could fully explain.
"Roasted weekly" is true. It just lives at the end of a supply chain that's months long and entirely out of our hands.
We keep a few weeks of green in the back, but not months of it — green coffee ages, and we'd rather buy small and often than warehouse a year of it going woody. So when a container slips, we run out. The El Naranjo went dark on the shelf not because we stopped roasting it but because there was nothing to roast.
It's back now. It tastes the same as it always does, which is the small miracle at the end of a frustrating month. If your favorite disappears for a couple of weeks sometime, this is usually why — and it'll be worth the wait when it returns.
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