Sourcing — Before the Roast
Before the Roast
Variety trials across growing environments, climate scenarios for 2050 and a study of green-coffee storage: three stages in coffee's life before roasting.
Coffee's agricultural story includes the performance of plant varieties in different environments and the storage of green beans before roasting. World Coffee Research's variety trials examine the first relationship; a 2025 storage study examines the second. Between them sits a planning question: how might varieties perform under future climatic conditions? Together, these subjects describe decisions and conditions upstream of the roaster, from comparisons among existing arabica varieties to packaging and the environment around stored green coffee.
Breeding Networks and Variety Trials
World Coffee Research's 2025 annual report covers four programme areas: breeding, trials, nursery work and global leadership. The report describes the organisation's progress during the preceding year. Its account includes the tenth anniversary of the International Multilocation Variety Trial, a collaboration among researchers in more than a dozen countries studying 31 existing arabica varieties.
The report also highlights a study produced in 2025 showing that resistance to coffee leaf rust depends on both genetics and environment. Resistance, in that finding, is a relationship involving the plant and the conditions in which it grows. Breeding and trials sit alongside nursery work in the report's account of coffee research, connecting the study of plants with the environments where their performance is assessed.
Climate Scenarios for Replanting
World Coffee Research's February 2026 CafeClima announcement describes a free, publicly available tool for exploring varieties and future climates in coffee replanting planning. CafeClima is available in English and Spanish. Its performance data come from the International Multi-Location Variety Trial, described in the announcement as a decade-long initiative led by World Coffee Research with national coffee institutes in 18 countries. The platform includes data on 26 varieties across a range of climatic conditions.
CafeClima pairs those performance records with climate projections from the Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT. The resulting view addresses both where coffee may grow in 2050 and which varieties are most likely to thrive in the projected environments.
One feature is the use of “climate analogs”. These are present-day locations whose climates resemble the conditions projected for a particular region in 2050. The comparison gives a future climate a present-day counterpart. CafeClima estimates a variety's potential success from patterns in the trial data, using observed performance alongside the projected environment.
Green Beans Have a Storage Environment
After the agricultural questions comes the storage question. A 2025 study of green-coffee packaging and storage locations examined physical and sensory quality over 365 days. The researchers investigated different packaging types under different storage conditions. Their account identifies bean quality, the storage environment and packaging characteristics as factors in preserving coffee's sensory properties. The experiment concerns green coffee, before roasting.
The study describes packaging as a means of preserving bean quality during the postthreshing stages. Its research question brings two parts of that preservation together: the type of package around the green coffee and the environmental conditions in which the package is stored.
At Alto de Letras, temperature and relative humidity remained constant during the evaluation. The sensory quality, expressed as the total Specialty Coffee Association score, was preserved for the full 365 days in PE-EVOH, PE-PAV, PE-double and PP-PVC packages. It was not preserved in FN packaging.
The results at the other storage locations were different. There, the researchers reported significant effects on the sensory score at different storage times regardless of packaging type. The environment affected how well the various packages preserved quality.
The study gives green coffee a history expressed in storage time, packaging and environmental conditions. Its year-long evaluation measured physical and sensory qualities, and its preservation result was reported through the sensory score. Alongside the variety trials and CafeClima's projections, it shows another stage at which surroundings matter: the environment of the growing plant, the projected climate for a variety and the storage setting of the unroasted beans.
The vocabulary of roast levels and origin labels is covered in Roasts & Origins. The seasonal rhythm at the drinking end of the journey appears in The Coffee Year.