What is Small-Lot Coffee?

You’ve probably noticed by now that we often offer small quantities of very special coffees in our online store. Maybe you’ve wondered why that is. It goes back to the fact that many excellent specialty coffees are small lot. But what does that even mean?

As you know coffee is an agricultural product produced by farmers all over the world. We talked about how we choose our producers in a previous blog post, and if you’ve bought a bag of coffee from us or followed us for a while you’ve probably noticed how we share information on all the farmers we work with. Coffee farmers are key to the specialty coffee world going round and round!

Oftentimes these coffee farms are small. Many of them are family owned and operated. Even the bigger farms are often only a few hectares. All of this can result in small harvests, especially when you add in the fact that many of these farms are split into growing different varietals.

Take, for example, a small family farm in Colombia that has a few hectares of coffee plants. Their fields are split into growing five or six different varietals of coffee. Maybe they grow a few tried and true varietals that they know do well in that region. Maybe they dedicate the rest of their fields to cultivate new varieties of coffees. At harvest time they produce five or six different lots of coffee from these different fields. All of those lots would be small considering how they’ve chosen to cultivate different varietals rather than just grow a bunch of one coffee.

And maybe one of those new varietals this family cultivated ends up being incredible. They’ve discovered something magical, a fresh new coffee varietal that grows beautifully on their land. The send it off to an importer here in the U.S. That importer sells the lots to a few different roasters, breaking it up even further.

That’s the story of how we often end up with very small quantities of some amazing single origin coffees here at BonLife. But our love for small-lot coffees goes further than finding fun new varietals from innovate farms.

Supporting the small farms that produce these small lot coffees supports their communities; often these farms are giving back to their own communities and providing good jobs to their neighbors. We like knowing our dollars are contributing to that! Supporting small lot farmers is often great for sustainability too; many of these farms are implementing sustainable practices on their farms, exploring ways to save water, and planting native plants to promote biodiversity. Supporting these farms also supports innovation in the coffee world, providing them with the income to continue to experiment with new varietals and processing methods which at the end of the day leads us to more fun coffees to try and share with you!