Small Incomparable Blue Mountain Coffee

As owners of a small piece of the incomparable Blue and John Crow Mountains, Rocksteady Coffee are first and foremost true stewards of the land. Our organic, sustainable, and equitable farming practices serve as our guiding star and demonstrate our commitment to our local community.

Beneath the chocolatey notes and the smooth finish is something even more remarkable than other Blue Mountain coffees: a team working together to produce coffee the best way we know how.

Year-Round Slow Farming

While you reap the bounties of our harvest season, you’re really seeing the product of 11 months of work by our small team of farmers here in Cascade in the parish of Portland. 

We spend nearly the entire year caring for the trees and the soil with the following approaches:

• Enacting an organic philosophy (bushing, organic fertilizers, and natural vegetation) to control weeds from overgrowth and best protect our unique soil environment
• Planting seedlings and preserving wood trees by pruning and never cutting to retain biodiversity and provide desirable shade for our coffee trees

Hand-Reaping Every Harvest

Each of Rocksteady Coffee’s farmers bring decades of experience and a keen eye for spotting the most perfectly ripe coffee cherries, leaving those that need a little more of nature’s nurturing hand for another day.

Hand-reaping only the perfect beans is how we guarantee that every cup of coffee has only the chocolatey notes that serve as an anthem for the Blue Mountains, our farmers, our commitment and our process.

Pulping & Washing on Our Farm

We do all this on the farm to keep a close eye on those beans but also so we can use the spring water from the farm to rinse off, by hand,  the sweet inner layer of the berries. 

Our process is a semi-wash, and we can only achieve it by rinsing our beans by hand. Another coffee producer will use a larger pulping machine equipped with a washer for a full wash. Our way isn’t just more careful, but we use significantly less water in our production.

Drying & Resting in Kingston

There, we dry our coffee on metal wire trays suspended three feet above the ground for proper air circulation. We opt for this method because drying coffee on the ground presents quality risks: beans dried on the ground or floor won’t dry evenly, and some beans will over-dry, semi-bake, or even ferment.

Finally, we let our beans rest. Our dried coffee rests for a minimum of two months to develop the complexity within those chocolatey notes.

Sorting, Roasting & Distribution

Because of our processes, we move our green coffee beans quickly, never leaving them in storage. For the vast majority of coffee producers, this is impossible.

Many of our orders travel only a few miles to luxury hotels and Jamaican specialty retailers, meaning our beans spend most of their life on our beautiful island. However, a select portion of our harvest is available to our growing global customers, as part of our wholesale program, who receive their coffee within 20 days after roasting.

To learn more or enquire about our wholesale program, contact ricardo@rocksteadycoffee.com