The Ethiopian harvest and shipping calendar.

Ethiopia's main Arabica harvest runs approximately October to January, but that national window is an average across a country with enormous variation in altitude, latitude and rainfall pattern. The window that matters is the one for the specific growing area you are buying from. In Amaro, the harvest runs approximately September – December, at 1,700–1,800 metres above sea level. Amaro is an administrative zone in Ethiopia, recently named as Koore Zone, and is not administratively part of the Sidama Region. In international coffee markets, coffee from Amaro is commonly presented within the broader Sidama coffee category. The origin is described in full on the Amaro page.

Altitude is the main driver of the shift. Higher-grown coffee matures more slowly and picks later, which is why two areas a short distance apart can be weeks out of step. Rainfall timing shifts the window year to year, and a late or interrupted rain can both delay picking and stretch it, because cherry ripens unevenly and pickers pass through the same trees repeatedly.

For a buyer, the practical consequence is that a harvest window is a planning input, not a delivery promise. Contracting against "new crop" without naming the growing area, the harvest year and the point at which the coffee is expected to be ready leaves the most important variable unstated. The washed and natural lots on our coffee page are recorded per lot for exactly this reason.

Picking is the start of the calendar, not the end of it. Between the last cherry picked and a container leaving the country sits a sequence of operations, each of which takes real time and none of which can be safely compressed.

1. 01Intake and sorting. Cherry is delivered to the washing station within hours of picking and separated by density and defect before processing begins.
2. 02Processing. Washed lots have the fruit removed before drying; natural lots dry whole with the fruit intact. The method is decided and recorded per lot.
3. 03Drying. Parchment or cherry is dried, typically on raised beds, turned regularly and monitored down to target moisture. Natural lots take substantially longer than washed lots because there is far more water in the fruit to remove.
4. 04Resting, or conditioning. Dried parchment is held in store to allow moisture to equalise through the bean before hulling. Milling too early produces uneven, unstable green.
5. 05Hulling and milling. Parchment or dried cherry is removed, and the green is cleaned, screened, density-sorted and in many cases colour-sorted.
6. 06Grading and certification. A sample goes to the national authority for the raw and cup assessment that produces the export grade.
7. 07Bagging, lot formation and export documentation.

Zoebar runs stages one through six at its own washing station in Amaro, and the full sequence with its operational detail is set out on the process page. Because the station is Zoebar-owned rather than contracted, the dates attached to each stage are an operational record rather than a report passed on from a third party.

Ethiopia is landlocked. Every container of Ethiopian coffee therefore has an inland leg before it has an ocean leg, and the overwhelming majority of it moves overland to the Port of Djibouti, the country's principal maritime gateway. This single fact reshapes how Ethiopian coffee contracts should be read.

• The inland leg is long, and it is exposed to road conditions, customs processing at the border and container availability, none of which behave like a berth window at a coastal port.
• Because there is no Ethiopian sea port, a term such as FOB is always FOB at a foreign port, which means the seller has already carried the coffee across an international border before risk transfers.
• Container availability at the inland origin can be the binding constraint during the peak export period, when the whole crop is moving at once.

This is why the named place in an Incoterms rule matters as much as the rule itself for Ethiopian coffee, and why FCA at a named inland point and FOB Djibouti allocate cost and risk very differently despite both being routine in the trade. The Incoterms guide works through the consequences in detail.

Once loaded, transit time depends on the destination, the service and the number of transhipments. Coffee moving to European and Middle Eastern destinations is generally a shorter run than coffee moving to North America or East Asia, and a service with a transhipment can add materially to the door-to-door time without any single leg looking unusual.

Working backwards from a harvest that finishes in December: processing, drying and resting occupy the following weeks, milling and certification follow, and export documentation is prepared against a nominated vessel. New-crop Ethiopian coffee therefore commonly reaches destination warehouses during the first half of the following calendar year. Arrivals earlier than that are usually early-harvest lots; arrivals later are usually stock held at origin.

The calendar becomes useful when it is turned into contract terms. Four decisions carry most of the risk.

Name the shipment period, not the arrival date

A seller controls when a container is delivered to the carrier. A seller does not control the vessel schedule, the transhipment or the destination port's working. Contracts are conventionally written against a shipment period for this reason, and a buyer who insists on a guaranteed arrival date is asking the seller to price in a risk neither party controls.

Fix approval of the sample before shipment

Decide explicitly which sample governs: the pre-shipment sample drawn from the actual lot, or an earlier offer sample. Write in the approval window and what happens if it lapses. This is the single most common source of dispute in a first shipment.

Decide where quality and weight are determined

Quality and weight can be determined at origin, at destination, or by an independent inspection at a named point. Each allocates the transit risk differently, and each produces a different answer when a shipment arrives out of specification. Name the point and the inspector in the contract.

Align the roasting plan to the milling date

If freshness matters to your programme, the milling date is the clock that matters. Build your intake schedule around it and around the storage conditions between milling and arrival, rather than around the harvest year printed on the bag.