In this edition: six coffees released this week, one coffee released this morning & a Cup of Excellence winning coffee from 2017 that was just roasted (and sold out in 13 hours).

Not in this edition: the woman who says she didn't realize she was pregnant until she was in the hospital delivering a baby.

I had an idea: If you forward this e-mail to two people you know who love coffee and cc (or bcc) me, I'll pick one of you at random and send you any bag you want from Passenger, who's featured in the story below.

If you received this e-mail from a friend, you can subscribe here.

If you signed up in the last week and want to read about coffee tariffs, pourovers on Mount Everest, or $43 grocery store gesha (I have a couple more free 15g packs available) — hit the archive.

Welcome to the fourth edition of the coffee index.

Let's get right into it. The list is at 1544 coffees, plus 538 that have sold out since I started this project (yes, I track those too). This week, 85 coffees were added. Here are my six that piqued my interest:

1. At $55, plus shipping, plus tariffs, this is not a coffee most people will buy. Oh wait, did I say it's $55 for 15 grams? Yeah, not for me. But I had to write about it because this was the week I realized I was living under a rock. The LA Times wrote about the (admittedly) tiny coffee industry in California in February 2024. And here we have this gesha grown in Montecito, California at the staggering elevation of... 130 meters. It was listed for sale on Saturday by Leaves Coffee in Tokyo. Maybe I'll buy a vial of it if this little endeavor ever turns a profit. That said, hopefully the California coffee industry will have sufficiently scaled by that point so I don't have to forego two bags of another great coffee to afford a single cup of this stuff. Tasting notes: Orange blossom, black currant, white grape, orange, yellow peach, round.​
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2. Rus Chan co-owns R Ki Coffee Lab in Vancouver — the shop that lets you brew your own pourover and take $1 off the price of it. He also roasts some heavy hitters, including this Tanzanian washed gesha grown at Finca La Hermosa in Guatemala for their Gesha Forest auction. The farm also grows gesha plants from Colombia, Panama, Ethiopia and, of course, their native Guatemala. Tasting notes: Chinese daffodil, emerald grape, orange longan, white peach.
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3. I have a lot — a lot — of co-ferments on the list, but this offering from Presta in Tucson, Arizona is the only one that involves bananas. Dried, ground bananas to be specific. This is a pink bourbon from Huila, Colombia (where 90 percent of the pink bourbons on the list are from), and Presta says the fermentation lends a "creamy texture" to the brew. Tasting notes: Banana, candy, cake, creamy, brown spice, milk chocolate.​
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4. As noted above, I'm tracking upwards of 2000 coffees, and just three of them are the Mokka variety. So when Blanchards in Richmond, Virginia dropped this unique coffee on Sunday, I knew I wanted to share it. This is the first time Blanchards has contracted coffee from Luis Anastasio Castro's Juanachute farm in Costa Rica, and they describe a "syrupy cola-like body" that exhibits "subtle notes of cardamom and sweet spices" as it cools. Use the code THECOFFEEINDEX for 10 percent off this and all single origin coffees. Tasting notes: Plum, cardamom, cola.​
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5. Next week's e-mail will feature a not-deep-but-not-shallow dive on the SL28 variety's growing popularity outside of Kenya. One such coffee just hit the menu at Apollon's Gold — this white honey processed SL28 from Tarrazu that Yoshi at Apollon's says blew his team away with its perfect representation of the variety. I've got a code for this one too — use THEINDEX for 15 percent off. Tasting notes: Japanese cherry, jasmine, grapefruit, white wine.
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6. Another item on my ever-growing list of topics to write about is why coffee is so prolifically grown in Ethiopia, but barely at all in neighboring Sudan. There's something romantic to me about the sudan rume variety — it traces its origin to modern day South Sudan and is not genetically modified to grow faster, heartier or free from disease. And in fact, it's considered the ancestor to a number of other varieties beloved by coffee lovers (including the aforementioned SL28). Google it and you'll read tales of the "wild coffee forests of East Africa." I mean just take my money and gimme some of this coffee. This Colombian example from Rigoberto Herrera and roasted by PT's in Kansas came for sale over the weekend. It's a light-medium roast. For a lighter roast, check out the same coffee from Hydrangea. Tasting notes: Oolong, papaya, caramel.notes: Japanese cherry, jasmine, grapefruit, white wine.
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7. A crazy late add here. Overnight last night, Sey dropped such a unique offering that I'm sitting here writing it up 30 minutes before I hit send. You tell me if you've ever seen a Sidra-Mejorado blend before. I haven't! This comes from producer Miguel Dota and a tiny 2.5 acre farm in Ecuador. Yet another exercise in separating me from my money. Tasting notes: Matcha, mango, ripe strawberries.

As I wrote in the first edition of this newsletter, I discovered specialty coffee by accident five years ago when I was in Lancaster, Pennsylvania on a work trip covering Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. Exhaustion had set in and I started googling coffee shops. One wonders how many thousands of dollars and how much counter space I’d have saved had Passenger Coffee not been my initiation to this world. But it had, and I’d now like to apologize to my wife for there being no room for anything in the kitchen.

Passenger freezes every gram of green coffee they buy. It helps to be surrounded by agriculture.

"We sort of lucked out in that there was this sort of big freezer [nearby] – basically a production facility for vegetables, produce and stuff,” Russ Durfee, Passenger’s director of coffee says, “And they allow us to rent space there."

So every week, head roaster Aaron Alvis and another member of the Passenger team rolls over to the vegetable warehouse in the company’s Isuzu box truck they call Susie, and load her up with the 40 (ish) bags of coffee they’ll roast over the next seven days.

Earlier this month, Passenger defrosted, roasted and immediately sold out of a coffee grown in 2017, a washed caturra from producer Filadelpo Mejia that was a winner in Peru’s inaugural Cup of Excellence competition.

Of the 60 or 70 coffees Passenger will roast every year, the team chooses about 20 to set aside for their archival release series (Mejia’s selection was one of the oldest remaining in the archive). They set aside 10 pounds of each to defrost down the line.

"We have pallets and pallets, hundreds and hundreds of bags of coffee on pallets in the warehouse freezer," Durfee says. But the archival selections are stacked in plastic buckets, "and we have about one or two pallets that are just stacked with these 10 pound incremental archival selections."

And they’re still good after eight years?

"Every so often, especially if things are getting really old, we'll bring it back and roast it and cup it to see if it's good. And if we decide that it is still showing well, then we'll just kind of make sure that we can get that coffee out the door."

Next year, Passenger will release the oldest coffee in their archive – put in a bucket in 2016 and left to chill, literally, next to pallets of potatoes, squash and other local produce.

"We tasted it recently, and I was blown away. I feel like it's the best example of how well freezer preservation works," Durfee says.

The primary benefit of freezing the green coffee isn't just to be able to sell a few bags of archival releases — it's more meaningful than that. Passenger works with the same producers year after year.

"And it's always great to be able to go to our long time producer partnerships and just be able to buy way more than we would otherwise," Durfee says.

Plus, they get the added benefit of consistent roasts. Since all of the coffee is coming from the same harvest and frozen green, a 10 oz bag purchased in April should taste the same as a bag bought in August.

Durfee is also cognizant that Passenger is not the only (or the first) roaster to do this. A little research indicates that George Howell was doing it before anyone else (kind of an evergreen statement about Mr. Howell, actually).

I know a lot of us freeze our roasted coffee to preserve it when we’ve got too much on hand. I told Russ that I recently brewed a cup of Passenger's offering from Elida Estate that I bought in April 2022. I’m no expert, but I thought it was excellent. Some roasters advise against freezing their coffees.

In a 2018 article, Howell, the coffee legend, offers a concise rebuttal to those roasters: "They are wrong."

Photos Courtesy of Passenger Coffee; Credit: Julianna Stallings.

If you want to read more about Passenger's mission to freeze its green coffee, check out this journal entry from the roaster.

Remember, if you forward this e-mail to two friends and cc me, you're in the running to win any bag of coffee from them that you want.

If you have an idea for a future newsletter, want to talk coffee, or have any feedback whatsoever — just reply to this e-mail.

Next week: more coffee and an exploration of SL28's not grown in Kenya.

Thanks as always for reading.

Jeff