You've probably heard the name. Here's what it actually is, and why our green buyer is watching it closely.
El Niño gets thrown around a lot, usually attached to a headline about weather going strange somewhere. Less often does anyone explain what it is, or why a coffee roaster would care. So we sat down with Roland Glew, our Green Buyer, to work through it.
Start with the ocean
"El Niño and La Niña are variations in ocean temperature which drive fairly extreme weather," Roland says. "It's a cycle that applies and has always applied across the world. You have periods of relatively more neutral average weather, and years where you're having more extreme weather."
That's the whole thing in one sentence. The Pacific warms or cools, and the knock-on effects reach almost everywhere. The pattern shifts irregularly every two to seven years, disrupting normal wind and rainfall patterns across the tropics.
Where we are in the cycle
We're at the start of one. NOAA's Climate Prediction Center upgraded its alert from El Niño Watch to El Niño Advisory in June 2026, meaning conditions weren't forecast any more, they were here.
"There's currently some predictions that it's likely we're seeing the start of a super El Niño at the moment, meaning a strong intensity El Niño," Roland says. "We've had these years in the past. It means relatively more extreme weather in the coming six to nine months, and that's likely to impact the whole globe. That's going to impact the UK, it's going to impact producing countries."
The forecasts back him up. NOAA's outlook has El Niño highly likely to continue into early 2027, with forecasters assigning a significant chance it reaches "very strong" territory, sometimes called a super El Niño. Australia's weather bureau has said it could become one of the strongest in seven decades. For the current numbers, NOAA updates its forecast monthly.
Why plants don't like it
"In general, those more extreme weather conditions aren't good for plants," Roland says. "Most plants are not going to do well in those kinds of extreme weathers that are outside the normal climate and life cycle for those plants. So we're likely to see harm to production."
Coffee is fussier than most. It needs rain at the right moment to flower in sync, and dry weather at the right moment to harvest and dry the cherry. Get the timing wrong in either direction and you lose yield, quality, or both. Without rain at the right point, flowers abort and fruit doesn't fill properly.
Brazil is the clearest example
"You're having issues at the moment with rain in Brazil, when normally now would be a dry period for the harvesting," Roland says. "Because it's raining, that's hard to harvest whilst it's raining."
On paper, 2026 should be a big Brazilian year. The USDA forecast a record 2026/27 crop of 71.9 million bags, up 14% on the year before. Getting it out of the ground was another matter. By mid-July the harvest was 64% complete, behind the previous year's 77% and the five-year average of 70%.
The bigger worry is what comes next. El Niño can delay Brazil's September and October rains, which is exactly when flowering happens. That wouldn't touch the crop being picked. It would hit the one after it.
It doesn't land the same way everywhere
This is the part that gets flattened in most coverage. El Niño isn't one weather event, it's a redistribution.
The historical record suggests you need a strong event before you see a real dent in coffee production, and when it has happened, the damage has concentrated in Vietnam and Indonesia. Drought hit Vietnamese robusta hard during the 2015 to 2016 event. In Central America, the Pacific-facing regions of Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica and Colombia tend to get extended drought, while the Atlantic side of those countries and Peru get too much rain instead. East Africa often gets more rain than usual, which can help yields and simultaneously make drying harder and disease more likely.
Same event. Six different problems.
It's not arriving on an empty table
"Those producing countries are already under lots of pressure from climate change in terms of less predictable harvests and less predictable rains," Roland says. "Really this is just stacking on top of the other existing pressures of climate change, and labour shortages, and lack of money to invest in farms to help them become more resilient to these things."
That last point matters most. Resilience costs money. Shade trees, irrigation, soil work, replanting with hardier varietals: all of it takes investment years before it pays back. Farms that can afford it will ride this out better than farms that can't, and the gap between those two groups is where the real risk sits.
What the market thinks
Futures move on fear long before anyone counts a single bag.
"The commodity market, because it works on a futures system, its prices have gone pretty high," Roland says. "They're looking at this year and next year and into the next year's harvest even, and saying we think there's a good chance the volume produced will be less than what's needed. So they decided to put those futures prices up to factor that in."
You could watch it happening through 2026. Arabica hit a low in early June, then climbed almost 50% inside a month on harvest delays and El Niño worry, with warehouse stocks near multi-year lows amplifying every scare. None of that reflects a single bag of coffee failing to arrive. It's the market pricing in what might happen.
That doesn't translate into a bag on the shelf costing more the following week. What it does mean is that everyone along the chain, from the farm to us, starts planning around a wider range of outcomes than usual.
Nobody knows yet
Roland is careful here, and he's right to be.
"El Niño and La Niña is a cycle that is not wholly predictable or consistent. Scientists now are better at predicting it and managing it and understanding it, but we're still talking percentages. We won't really know until next year whether some of these things start to play out, and if so, how severe they end up being."
"It's very hard to know exactly at the moment how bad this impact will be. There are some people saying this could be fairly severe if it plays out. It's still all about models and percentages, so we won't know until harvest starts to happen."
So: an increased risk of poor harvests, on top of pressures that were already there, with a market that has priced in the fear ahead of the fact. That's the honest version.
What it means for your coffee
The thing to hold onto is that El Niño isn't a switch. It won't change every price or ruin every harvest. It's a risk multiplier. Some origins will get hit harder than others, some farms are better prepared than others, and none of it becomes clear until the cherries come in.
What we can tell you is that we're buying the way we always have. Long relationships, prices agreed with producers rather than dictated by a screen in New York, and a willingness to pay what a coffee is worth when a harvest goes against a farm. That approach costs more in a calm year. In a year like this one, it's the whole point.
Roland Glew is the Green Buyer for Ozone Coffee Roasters and the founder of Strategic Coffee Sourcing.