If you read our blog on International Women's Day, you'll know we've been gearing up to have a new apprentice roaster in the business. That's right, Jean has put down her VAT paperwork and stepped out from behind her desk to learn the ropes when it comes to roasting.

And, if you've read that same blog post, you'll know she's starting with a very special coffee because it's been grown entirely by female producers.

Well, we're excited to announce that that special coffee - Mexico Mujeres Mazateca - is now available to pre-order for early October dispatch.

Through this collaboration with our friends at Raw Material, we are quite literally empowering women in the coffee industry at home and overseas. In Mexico, the Mujeres Mazateca coffee has been grown collectively by 74 female coffee farmers across the Sierra Mazateca area of the country.

For some of these woman, a whole season's harvest can be as small as 2.4kg, which leaves them lacking selling power. That's why Red Beetle Coffee Lab, which they sell to, combines their coffees for export, providing the volume and, in return, the collective selling power that they lack individually.

This enables the hard work and the wares of some of the area's most under-represented and under-resourced female producers to be celebrated across the globe.

And at the coffee's roasting point here in Whitehaven, we're empowering Jean to stretch her wings in the coffee industry by learning the ropes as a roaster. After nearly a decade as co-director of a coffee roastery, some might see it as long overdue. There are certainly benefits across the business of having two trained roasters instead of just one.

Jean started her training earlier this month on our Ikawa sample roaster, roasting 50g at a time to test out different roast development times and get a feel for how the beans should be roasted.

She has since moved on to a crash course in how to use the Golden Coffee Roasters machine, where she will eventually roast the Mujeres Mazateca beans.

Jean says: "I'm very excited to learn this new skill. I'm looking forward to the challenge of roasting although I'm a bit nervous because there's so much information."

Turning her hand to roasting has brought into perspective everything that's involved, from moving heavy sacks and buckets of beans, to remembering all the settings for the roaster, from timings to temperatures and so much more.

She added: "Seeing everything Mark's been doing for so long from a different perspective, I have a new respect for it. He does a lot, and keeping all that information in his head, I don't know how he does it!"

Once she's learned her new trade with this lot, the plan is to train Jean further so she can share the roasting responsibilities with Mark, increasing our roasting capacity and freeing him up to further develop the business.

For now, though, our focus is on this historic moment in time for both Shiloh Coffee Roasters and Jean herself, and you have the chance to pre-order your very own bag of landmark coffee.

The Mexico - Mujeres Mazateca coffee is available to pre-order now for £9 per 250g bag and £33 for 1kg. We've opened it to pre-orders as, for Jean's training, it would be great for her to be able to roast all this coffee back to back. So by ordering yours today, you'll be helping Jean get the best training experience possible.

We'll only have about 50kg of these very meaningful beans available to buy so if you'd like a share of this momentous coffee we recommend pre-ordering now before if sells out.