Coffee of the Week: Celebration 2023

Coming into the post-Halloween home stretch of 2023, we're excited to release this year's iteration of our holiday blend that we call Celebration. For the past 12 years, Highwire has crafted this blend as a limited offering to close out the year. The coffees that comprise the blend are selected to build a flavor palette reflective of the season. 

For Celebration 2023, we built the blend around a coffee that has been a work-horse for us this year, the incredibly sweet and rich Santa Maria de Dota, from Costa Rica's renowned CoopeDota. This versatile coffee has been the backbone of our signature espresso, The Core, for several months as well as a single origin offering. We look to this coffee to provide a dense, fruited-chocolate base that we could build around.

To the Santa Maria de Dota, we added a recent arrival from the Nebilyer Valley in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea. We look forward to the return of coffees from PNG every year as their arrivals are usually one of the first for us from the Southern Hemisphere. We traditionally use this coffee in several blends as it brings body, heft, and a spicy character to the cup, often accompanied with a maple-like sweetness. That sweetness really comes through in Celebration 2023, especially in the long finish. 

Finally, as an accent, we included a peaberry from the Rumukia Farmers Cooperative Society, based in Kenya's Nyeri County. This coffee's layered, sweet citrus flavor, with a juicy, berry-like acidity add a particular sparkle to our holiday blend without overwhelming the cup.  

As with all of our blends, Celebration 2023 is roasted to balance these contributing characteristics into comfortingly rich coffee!

For those of you who have enjoyed celebrating with us over the years, you may notice a reflection of Highwire's redesign in this year's sticker.  We collaborated with designer Elizabeth Vereker, the same artist responsible for the look of our new brand, to create an image for Celebration 2023 that riffs on our previous holiday artwork, while fully embracing the use of color and shape.