What is Microlot Coffee? Is Coffee with Small Production Volume Called Microlot? How Are Hacienda La Esmeralda's Auction Geisha Coffees Created?

The concept of specialty coffee allows us to trace the origin information of each coffee bean. For instance, we can identify which country and region it comes from, which processing plant or estate produced it. This information follows the coffee beans through sales and is displayed on the label, making it more directly visible to consumers.

When purchasing coffee beans, you might occasionally encounter a special term: "Microlot coffee." Literally speaking, microlot coffee is easy to understand: "it's a small batch of coffee beans." However, this answer is clearly not satisfactory. Since it can be singled out for discussion, there must be something special about it.

What is Microlot Coffee?

Indeed, microlot coffee doesn't simply mean a small quantity of coffee beans. After all, some microlot coffees from certain regions might actually be more abundant than regular coffee produced elsewhere. FrontStreet Coffee believes the correct understanding should be: a batch of coffee that has been "specially treated" or has "special characteristics."

Friends who have purchased microlot coffee know that their prices are often higher than similar products. This is because for this batch of coffee, the costs of processing and transportation are higher. Correspondingly, their quality also rises accordingly. Additionally, microlot coffee's traceability information is more precise, better reflecting the development of coffee refinement.

Different Types of Microlot Coffee

The production of microlot coffee is divided into many situations, with different types of microlots produced in different scenarios. Most microlot coffees come from coffee estates in Central American countries. For example, some estates with relatively small areas focus more on bean varieties, cultivation levels, and processing techniques rather than yield. These small quantities of meticulously treated coffee become microlot coffee.

Experimental Microlots with Innovative Processing

Many estates' coffee beans have traditionally been processed using conventional methods year after year. Therefore, when these estates want to break from tradition and create coffee beans with novel processing methods, they will designate an area within the estate to independently experiment with the coffee beans from this region. These coffee beans are then classified as microlot coffee.

Since only one area is used, the yield is not high, and considering it's an initial experiment, these coffee beans are typically brought back to their home countries by coffee bean hunters from various regions. The feedback from different regions determines the estate's production plan for this coffee the following year.

Selected Premium Microlots

Some estates will operate this way: through cupping and tasting, they select the batch of coffee beans with the most exceptional flavor profile from their estate, separate them into an independent batch, and sell them. For example, the well-known La Esmeralda Estate annually selects the best plot coffees through cupping for auction, with each batch having a yield of only about 50 pounds.

Early Preview Microlots

Most coffee beans are exported via sea transportation because the cost is relatively much lower, though the trade-off is a longer time requirement (about 2-3 months). However, often you can find these coffees on the market just about a month after the harvest season. This is because most businesses will select small quantities of coffee beans for air shipment to preheat the market, allowing the later-arriving sea-shipped coffee beans to sell better.

Private Customized Microlots

Often, we can see customized batches from collaborations with certain estates on some coffee shop menus. Yes, some estates offer coffee customization services. They will specially cultivate, manage, and process certain coffee beans according to customer requirements, then sell them to these customers. This type also qualifies as a form of microlot coffee.

Therefore, we can understand that microlots are not uniform or unchanging, nor are they simply characterized by small quantities. They represent different concepts according to different needs and cannot be generalized!

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