Beautiful coffees from Hacienda la Esmeralda, the farm that made gesha famous, have been beloved annual highlights of our menu since 2014. The present wet processed selection from the 2021 harvest has been carefully preserved in Passenger’s freezer facility since its arrival and we are incredibly proud to share it alongside three additional geshas from Ethiopia and Panama, as a limited Special Release collection. Coffee is native to the southwestern highlands of Ethiopia, near the South Sudanese border. In the 1930s a seed collecting expedition was ordered by the Kenyan Director of Agriculture. The wild coffee forests of Ethiopia, being the birthplace of Arabica coffee, are rich in genetic diversity. The purpose of the expedition was to find coffee accessions that were appropriate for cultivation throughout the British Colonies. As cup profile (i.e. flavor) was of little-to-no consideration at the time, productivity and resistance to disease were the primary considerations when searching for appropriate varieties. As an eventual result of this expedition, coffee from the Gesha region of southwest Ethiopia made its way to Costa Rica via Tanzania and eventually ended up on a farm that came to be owned by the Peterson family in Boquete, Panama. The 2021 harvest marked the seventh consecutive year that Passenger has contracted a special selection from Hacienda la Esmeralda. The present wet processed selection, offering the intense floral aromatics and elegantly nuanced flavors that have characterized our favorite coffees from this famous farm, was produced on the Tumaco plot, a small parcel of land that is located in close proximity to the original Cañas Verdes farm that was purchased by the Peterson family in 1967.