What is a Microlot Coffee?

Small batch, exclusive and ever so special flavour profiles, a microlot usually has an 85+ grade for the cupping score. This puts it in the top 1% of coffee beans in the world. As you can tell from this score, farmers spend a lot of time taking special care of their crops while growing these beans. A microlot comes from a single farm or even it can be a specific area within the farm. So they're super traceable which ticks a lot of Moyee boxes. 

How is a microlot coffee different?

The differentiation starts on the farm, these coffee beans grow with intensive and exclusive care. Farmers usually invest extra time and money on these coffee beans to provide high quality. Therefore, they can get higher returns on these beans which is an important element for our company’s mission. This creates an essential value for farmers as well as customers. Since a microlot grows in a specific location, it has a high traceability future. This is why roasters and customers will know little details such as where and under what conditions the coffee beans have grown.

Local climate, the quality of soil type, production and process methods all have a vital impact on the quality of your coffee beans. And importantly for us, knowing the farmer’s background creates trust between the product and the customer. It is almost like a personalised experience! This is why traceability creates an important value for customers. 

The Aims of the Moyee Microlot Series

We like to offer different tastes to our customers when it comes to a microlot. We had recent microlots from Ecuador, Guatemala, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Kenya. In 2023, we're aiming for new small batches as part of our microlot series every two months. We enjoy travelling around the coffee belt and finding like-minded social entrepreneurs that we can join forces with!

Our end goal is to empower coffee farmers to earn a living income and encourage farmers to adopt practices that protect and nurture habitats.   

Challenges to Overcome - How to Add More Impact

Of course when it comes to coffee, not all farmers are equal. Coffee farmers in some of the regions we source microlots from benefit from direct trade, added value exports meaning they can earn a good living from coffee. Speciality coffee roasters love these guys. However many of the coffee farmers in Ethiopia and Kenya we work with are on a completely different level - relying on subsistence farming, barter and the extra yearly income from coffee to keep them out of abject poverty. Most coffee farmers in the world, and particularly in Africa, are in the latter group, earning little more than €2 per day for a commodity ultimately more valuable than gold.

So living income programmes and the added FairChain value of roasting and packing at origin is really needed to help this cohort of farmers. Therefore, our regular range of coffee has the most impact of all but we wouldn't want to deprive you of the amazing speciality flavours from our different microlots. Some of them are roasted at origin by our partners like Amor Perfecto in Colombia; others are roasted locally in Amsterdam by us. 

The aim of course is to encourage more value-add at origin in countries we source these microlots from and to roast more varied coffees at our roastery in FairChain Kenya. Every order you make supports this aim and our FairChain mission!

To get notified when we launch our new microlot series click  here to subscribe to our email channel.

Help us to make every sip count by ordering coffee - regular range or microlot - here.