“Sweet 16” Seasonal Espresso

We’re about to turn 16, and this year we feel like celebrating the goofier adolescent moments–the silly names, cheeky stunts, and wide-ranging events that involved a lot of loud music, strange art, bike posses, and carefully considered costumes. We’re still kids, and our funny business has often been our edge.

As for the coffee, we remain unbelievably serious flavor nerds. 

Consider this spirited blend as if it were a montage of the unique history and happenings that make us who we are today. A reminder that we’re in it for the long haul, always fiercely independent, and still in the process of discovering our unique coffee culture, learning to steer it where we dream it can go.  

From Sweet Tooth to Sugar Skull, Sputnik to Stickball, Sno Cone to Side Door, the S.S. Ritual and its motley gang of fresh, youthful seasonal espressos sails on!

Our birthday espresso is sweet like caramel apples, orange blossoms, and grape soda. Sweet like cherry gummy bears and buttercream frosting.

But be warned: this one will careen down your gullet like it just got a driver’s license. Hop in! 

About the Components:

This is a blend of coffees from three noteworthy Latin American coffee lands: Honduras, Guatemala, and Costa Rica.

1/3 Alexander Sabillon, Honduras

1/3 Hacienda Carmona, Guatemala

1/3 Producer’s Pride, Costa Rica

Alexander Sabillon, Honduras

While history and tradition are the foundations of some of the best coffees in the world, sometimes it takes a young producer with a willingness to take chances and experiment to cultivate something really special. While hailing from a long line of coffee farmers in the Santa Bárbara region of Honduras, Alexander Sabillon is the youngest of his clan and the first to produce coffee that is truly specialty. After acquiring a small 1.5-hectare farm that was completely decimated by leaf rust just four years ago, Alexander has started fresh, doing a great job with replanting and pruning and managing his farm with the best of care.

Hacienda Carmona, Guatemala

In Antigua, Guatemala, coffee matriarch Maria Zelaya grows Bourbón and Typíca trees on her 110-hectare farm, Hacienda Carmona, at elevations between 1580 and 1890 meters above sea level. Maria is fiercely dedicated to producing quality coffee, and has built a beautiful beneficio. She processes the coffee in the traditional washed manner: depulping the skin of the coffee cherry off before subjecting it to a 24-hour fermentation process to deteriorate any remaining sugars off of the seed, and finally, sun-drying the coffee on patios.

Producer’s Pride, Costa Rica

In the hills surrounding the tiny town of La Piedra de Rivas, near the Chirripo National Forest in Costa Rica, 10 producing families have come together to build a micro-milling facility called Beneficio Los Crestones. As we begin our eighth year of working with these producers, we’re happy to see the fruits of a large scale rebuilding of drying tables – crucial infrastructure for the production of high quality coffee. With the new covered drying beds, there is now plenty of space for coffee to dry slowly and evenly, preserving the flavors we love about this coffee fresh at origin. This lot collects the coffees from several of the Los Crestones producers in a blend we’re calling Producer’s Pride. Containing Caturra, Catuai, and Villalobos varieties, Producers Pride is a clean, mechanically washed coffee, often called a white honey coffee.