As the holiday season begins once again, the Passenger coffee team is excited and proud to add three special coffees to the Reserve Lot menu as our final festive release of 2020. Each of the three coffees offers a distinct expression of the gesha variety and each of them illustrates different aspects of Passenger’s menu and approach to green coffee sourcing and preservation.

At the base of Passenger’s menu are five foundational partnerships that we continue to build on an ongoing basis with our producer partners from Daterra, Montecarlos, Divino Niño, Heza, and Agaro. The majority of the coffee we buy is purchased from these producers every year and, in addition to the Foundational coffees that we purchase, an increasing percentage of our Reserve Lot coffees are sourced from these farms as well. 2020 marks the third consecutive year that Passenger is featuring a gesha variety selection from Montecarlos Estate, a stunning farm in Apaneca, El Salvador that is owned and managed by Carlos and Julie Batres and also serves as the source of our foundational Montecarlos offering.

While many of the coffees on Passenger’s Reserve Lot menu come to our attention as a result of our foundational partnerships, sometimes unexpected coffee samples are sent to our lab in Lancaster, PA that are simply too delicious, or too intriguing, to refuse. El Guayabal Gesha, from a Mexican producer in the Veracruz region named Jesus Javier who has only just begun to produce specialty coffee, was immediately delicious and intriguing. We are very pleased to share Jesus’ coffee with you, not only as a remarkably sweet and clean expression of gesha plant genetics, but also as a testament to the incredible potential that we continue to see for specialty coffee production in Mexico, a country that has been represented on our menu all too rarely.

From the beginning, Passenger has devoted a great deal of time and energy to preserving all of the green coffees that we buy in deep freeze storage. Freezing green coffee indefinitely preserves the fresh, desirable qualities that the coffee possesses at time of freezing and prevents the development of flat, faded flavors that eventually and inevitably develop when green coffee ages too much prior to roasting. Freezing coffee also makes it possible for us to curate an archive of notable harvests from the past: saving some of the most extraordinary coffees that have graced Passenger’s menu in the past for future enjoyment. The present re-release of Passenger’s 2017 Green-Tip Gesha from the internationally renowned Elida Estate in Boquete, Panama, is a notable example of this archival approach. This immaculate, incredibly exotic gesha is without doubt one of the finest coffees that Passenger has ever had the opportunity to present.

Taken together, these three gesha selections from Latin America represent much of what Passenger has always been about and indicate much that we are excited to pursue in the future. Wherever this finds you and however you choose navigate the holiday season, please stay safe, be well, and keep lots of good coffee in your cup!