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It has been a remarkable summer in Britain. Five heatwaves, drought declared across almost three-quarters of England, and a run of dry weather that saw one Surrey weather station record 62 consecutive days without measurable rainfall. Wales had its driest July in 190 years. Most of us watched our lawns turn the colour of straw and got on with it.
Coffee doesn't grow here, of course. But the same forces have been at work across the coffee-growing world for several years now, and the effects travel a very long way. They reach the bag on your shelf — in how much there is of it, what it costs, and quite often how it tastes.
So here's what heat and drought actually do to a coffee crop, and what's happening right now.
A plant with narrow tastes
Arabica is fussy. It evolved in the cool, misty highlands of Ethiopia, and it has never entirely got over it. It likes moderate temperatures, humidity around 70%, and somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000mm of rain spread sensibly across the year. Give it that and it takes its time, filling the cherry slowly and building the sugars and acids that become flavour in the roaster.
Push the temperature past about 23°C and ripening speeds up. That sounds harmless, but it isn't: a cherry that ripens quickly has had less time to develop, and the cup shows it. Push past 30°C and the plant stops growing properly altogether and starts concentrating on survival.
This is the same principle behind the value we place on altitude. High-grown coffee is prized precisely because cool nights and warm days slow everything down. Heat does the opposite. It rushes the crop.
Rain has to arrive at the right moment
It isn't simply a question of how much rain falls. Timing matters enormously, and coffee is unusually particular about it.
The plant needs two separate rains to set a crop properly. The first triggers flowering — the farm turns white almost overnight, and it is one of the more extraordinary sights in agriculture. Then it needs a second, backing rain roughly three weeks later to secure the fruit set. Miss that second one, or spread it out unevenly, and the flowering happens in fits and starts.
The consequence is a farm where the cherries ripen at different times on the same tree. For a producer picking selectively by hand — which is what specialty demands — that is a serious problem. You either pick several times over and absorb the cost, or you pick once and accept underripe and overripe cherries going into the same lot. Neither option is good, and both show up in the cup.
What thirst does to the cup
When a coffee plant runs short of water it doesn't simply wait for rain. It makes decisions — and those decisions are about staying alive, not about producing a beautiful cup.
What tends to happen under drought stress:
- The cherries shrink. Insufficient rain late in the season reduces the proportion of large beans in a lot. Fewer big screens, more smalls.
- Sweetness drops away. The mucilage — the sticky, sugary layer around the bean that feeds fermentation during processing — thins out dramatically in a dry year. Producers report cherries with very little mucilage and very little sweetness after low-rainfall periods. Less sugar going in means less sweetness coming out.
- The bean gets less dense. Higher temperatures reduce bean density and mass. Density is a rough proxy for how much development went into the bean, and it's one of the first things we check on the bench.
- Defects creep up. After difficult seasons, roasters see a higher share of withered and shell beans — hollow, malformed things that roast unevenly and taste thin.
- The plant rushes. Under prolonged stress the tree accelerates maturation as a survival strategy, ripening cherries before they're ready and sometimes drying them out on the branch before anyone can pick them.
There is a broad direction of travel here, and it's worth being plain about it: heat and drought tend to push coffee towards a flatter, thinner, less sweet cup. Not undrinkable — often perfectly pleasant — but with less of the complexity and sweetness that makes specialty coffee worth the money.
What's actually happening this year
Here's where it gets interesting, because the headline and the reality are pointing in different directions.
On paper, 2026 is a recovery year. Brazil is forecast to bring in a record harvest of around 71.9 million bags, with arabica rebounding sharply and ending a five-year run of disappointing crops. Timely rain during last year's flowering did its job in Minas Gerais, where the majority of Brazil's arabica grows. Prices have eased accordingly — arabica futures closed around $3.28 per pound in mid-August, well down from the $4.32 peak of the past year.
Walk the farms, though, and it's less tidy. Growers in parts of São Paulo and southern Minas describe dry soils during fruit formation and intense heat, with recovery patchy from plot to plot. Some coffees are lighter in weight than their size suggests, meaning more beans are needed to fill the same 60kg bag. And in the week to 16 August, Minas Gerais received barely a tenth of its normal rainfall — with the next flowering, which sets the 2027 crop, only weeks away.
The Brazilian coffee industry association has warned that an El Niño cycle could disrupt that flowering badly enough to take 15 to 20% off the expected record. Meanwhile, exchange-certified stocks of coffee sit at their lowest level since late 2023. A record on paper and a thin cushion in reality is an uncomfortable combination.
None of which is a forecast — we roast coffee, we don't trade futures. But it explains why a "record harvest" year hasn't translated into cheap coffee, and why we're still cautious about promising anyone that prices are heading back to where they were five years ago.
What we do about it
Weather is not something we can fix from a roastery in the UK. What we can do is respond to it properly, and that comes down to a few unglamorous habits.
How a difficult year changes our work:
- We taste every lot, every season. A coffee we loved last year is not automatically the same coffee this year. Same farm, same variety, different rainfall — different cup.
- We adjust the roast to the bean, not the label. A less dense bean takes heat differently. Roasting this year's crop to last year's profile is how you end up with something baked and flat.
- We buy across origins. A range spread over South America, Central America, East Africa and Asia isn't only about variety on the shelf. It means one region's bad season doesn't empty it.
- We pay properly. The farms weathering this best are the ones investing in shade, irrigation, soil and resilient varieties — and that investment only happens if the coffee earns enough to fund it. Cheap coffee and adaptable farms are not compatible ideas.
Three coffees, three very different climates
One of the quiet pleasures of drinking single origin is that you're tasting a place and a season, not an abstraction. Here are three in our range that sit in genuinely different conditions.
Brazil Cerrado — grown in the region at the centre of everything described above. The Cerrado has sharply defined wet and dry seasons, which is precisely why the timing of rain matters so much there. Mild, balanced and smooth, and a good reference point for what Brazilian arabica does when the season goes well.
Colombia Antioquia — a fully washed coffee from the hills around Medellín. Colombia's mountainous geography and staggered harvest calendar give it a resilience Brazil's flatter, more concentrated growing regions don't have. Mild and nutty, with real chocolate depth.
Ethiopia Limu — shade-grown at altitude in the Oromia region, in something close to arabica's ancestral home. Shade canopy is one of the most effective defences a farm has against heat stress, and it shows in the cup: bright fruit, tart pear and a clean finish of clove.
The short version
Coffee is an agricultural product grown by people who cannot control the weather, in places that are getting harder to farm. A dry summer here is an inconvenience. A dry flowering season in Minas Gerais or Oromia rewrites a year's income for tens of thousands of families, and eventually rewrites what's available to us.
That's not a reason for gloom. It's a reason to pay attention — to notice when a familiar coffee tastes a little different this season, and to understand that the difference has a story behind it that started with rain, or the absence of it, eighteen months ago and five thousand miles away.
If you'd like to explore the range and taste a few of those stories side by side, you'll find everything in our specialty coffee collection.
And if it rains this weekend, spare a thought for how much good it would do somewhere else.
