Let’s scratch one trope off the board right away: the triumphant return of Isaias Fernandez to our menu is NOT a prodigal son situation. If anything, perhaps it’s more like Lebron returning to The Land, rings on fingers and ready for more, though we also should be clear that “the Touchy Coffee menu” is most certainly NOT the Cleveland Cavaliers of specialty coffee. So scratch that one also. One might go so far as to say that perhaps this situation has no convenient metaphorical reference point, and to those people we say… fair point, might as well get on with the story. And so:

Isaias Fernandez is an incredibly talented and meticulous young producer from Santa Barbara, Honduras, a region well known for yielding some of the country’s most esteemed coffees, year after year. He has his own small wet mill directly on his farm, La Finonca, and he grows an impressive range of varieties on its modest-but-mighty hills. Over the years, we’ve featured several single-variety separations as well as some pitch-perfect all-day field blends. He graced our menu in 2019, 2020, and 2021, but in 2022/2023 we received the bittersweet news that all of Isaias’s coffees had been scooped up by a different partner. While we can certainly never begrudge a farmer for doing what’s best for them, we definitely missed seeing his name on our menu. BUT THEN… flash forward to Christmastime, 2023, when longtime importing pals Collaborative Coffee Source decide to send us a super sweet holiday surprise: LATE HARVEST OFFERS FROM OUR DEAR OLD DUDE ISAIAS! Though we would never have had the gall to explicitly put such a thing on our Lists, there’s hardly anything we would rather have seen under the proverbial tree.

And so we wound up selecting two superb washed offerings from old friend Isaias, one of which is this pink n’ blue (truuuuuuuue gold) and pale purple gem of San Ramón and Catimor. Wonderful pink citrusy aromatics ascend on the nose and fruity pastry decadence takes over upon first sip, striking an impressively delicate balance between sweetness and brightness that few coffees can so deftly navigate.