Exceptional Coffee: Edin Lopez Gesha (2026)

We're delighted to share the Partner Story for the first coffee in our Exceptional Coffee series, Edin Lopez Gesha. This collection presents rare and limited availability coffees that are especially selected for their quality and distinctive character.

These coffees work harmoniously within our relationship-based sourcing framework and are produced, sourced, and roasted for an exceptional experience.

Kicking off this series is a superb gesha from a producer we already partner with, Edin Lopez (a name that you may recognize from a previous release, Honduras - Edin Lopez).

Edin and his family are relatively new to coffee, having moved to Santa Bárbara from the city in the last seven years or so. They reside in a part of the mountain called El Cedral where they have two plots under cultivation - the main farm, occupying just one hectare, and an even smaller variety garden.

The main farm begins at 1,400 meters elevation and is primarily planted with pacas and bourbon. In the coming years they plan to renovate the farm, sectioning it into quadrants which will be replanted with new varieties deemed optimal for the farm's soil and microclimate.

Key to this plan is Edin's variety garden, a 1,600-meter elevation plot no larger than our own roastery that is planted with numerous different coffee varieties, including exotics and traditional cultivars - among them catuaí, bourbon, parainema, and pacas alongside red and yellow pacamara, paraíso, SL-28, chiroso, and multiple lineages of gesha. Edin's goal with the variety garden is to identify which plants are the most successful in El Cedral and to generate a source for these varieties that he and other producers in Santa Bárbara can use for new plantings.

Edin currently processes his coffee at a neighboring relative's wet mill, though with limited production capacity, his hope is to build his own processing infrastructure for use next season. Once the coffee is depulped, fermented, and washed, he brings it back to his house to dry on raised and covered platforms.

This lot was fermented in clean plastic barrels, without the addition of water, to limit the presence of ambient oxygen. (The term more commonly used is "anaerobic," but at a metabolic level these definitions are more nuanced. We've opted for the term "anoxic" to more precisely reflect that it was the environment, and necessarily not fermentation, for which oxygen was a variable.) This style of processing impacts a coffee's flavor profile by favoring certain microbes (like lactobacillus species and certain yeasts) and excluding others (like acetobacter), which in turn impacts the perceived texture, sweetness, and acidity of the coffee.

Gesha is a delicate, low-yielding variety that can be very difficult to cultivate, hence its scarcity. When grown, harvested, processed, and roasted well, it produces an exceptional cup with floral aromas and delicate, citrus, and tea-like qualities or complex, syrupy fruit qualities depending on the processing.

Edin works with Beneficio San Vicente to bring his coffee to market. We've worked with the world renowned dry mill for years, mostly for community blends but more recently for traceable microlot coffees as well. The dry mill and exporter was founded in the 1990s by Fidel Paz, pursuing his father Cantalicio's vision of a supply chain that better served coffee producers in Honduras. Today Beneficio San Vicente is recognized as the source of some of the world's best coffees and is practically synonymous with the Santa Bárbara growing region.

We're grateful to Fidel's son, Benjamin, for connecting us with Edin and thrilled to share this wonderful coffee with you.

Explore our recommended Brew Guides for this Exceptional Coffee here and don't hesitate to reach out to us with any feedback or questions - we'd love to hear from you!