PRIDE 2025, Costa Rica
Region: Coto Brus, Costa Rica
Producer: 11 Women Producers (Community Lot)
Varietal: Caturra, Catuai
Process: Washed
$1 of each bag sold will be donated to the Whitman-Walker Medical Center.
"For over fifty years, Whitman-Walker has been part of the fabric of the local DC and national community. Founded to support the needs of the LGBTQ community, Whitman-Walker was a first responder and care-provider for those living with HIV. We are a leader in care and policy advocacy; a research center working to discover breakthroughs in HIV treatment and prevention science. Whitman-Walker envisions a society where all people are seen for who they are, treated with dignity and respect, and afforded equal opportunity to health and wellbeing."
A little about the coffee before going into JR's story/inspo behind the release.
Doña Isa is a standout coffee sourced through our origin partner, La Minita. This is their first trademarked lot from Costa Rica made entirely from cherry grown by women producers.
La Minita worked closely with 11 women farmers in the Coto Brus region—near their farm, Hacienda Rio Negro—to bring this coffee to life. Each producer received an additional premium for their cherry, supporting their participation and recognizing their work.
That premium goes beyond the cup: it helps fund sustainable farming practices, local development projects, and mentorship opportunities for other women in coffee. We're honored to support this effort, and to share a coffee that reflects the strength of partnership, transparency, and equity at origin.
Our Head Roaster, JR's, Pride 2025 Release and inspiration -
In April of 1980, Ken Horne, a gay man in San Francisco, would be the first person in the US to be diagnosed with Kaposi’s Sarcoma. The next year he would be retroactively classified as the first patient of the AIDS epidemic.
Halloween, 1980, Gaetan Dugas was incorrectly labeled as patient zero for AIDS, due to his connections to New York City bath houses.
On December 23, 1980, Rick Wellikoff dies from AIDS in Brooklyn. He would be the fourth known person to die from AIDS in America.
For the next decade plus, AIDS, and later, HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, would be labeled as a gay cancer. While the CDC was charting an epidemic in the states and health officials worldwide were doing the same, the Reagan administration sat on their hands as over 100,000 people would lose their lives to AIDS between 1981 and 1990. The most shocking fact of this is over one-third of these people would die in just 1990 alone.
It took people like Rock Hudson, famous old Hollywood actor, to contract AIDS and die, and Ryan White, a teenaged hemophiliac from Indiana, to contract AIDS from an infected blood transfusion, before government officials moved to address the virus.
While many people in 90s America learned about AIDS through Magic Johnson’s HIV diagnosis, Eazy-E’s death from AIDS, or Pedro Zamora of MTV’s “The Real World”, I had the fortune to learn about AIDS in the home.
Tony was my dad’s partner in the 90s and, for what it’s worth, my stepparent. Spending my early years with someone dying from AIDS during a worldwide epidemic was often hard to grasp. I’d watch MTV and artists would make this their main talking point, begging for people to learn more and do more. I’d go to school where people would think AIDS was on water fountains and meant you were gay and gross. I’d go to my mom’s house, where though she loved Tony, she would give me misinformation and make me afraid to touch many things around my dad’s house. Remember COVID misinformation and disinformation? Well, take that and multiply it by a factor of 10 and that’s what it was like as a preteen navigating life with a person with AIDS.
While others learned about AIDS from movies like “Philadelphia”, where they could see Denzel Washington’s character have an arc of AIDSphobic to loving ally to Tom Hanks’ gay AIDS patient character, I had reminders like my dad’s summer cookouts. Multiple times a year, he’d fire up the grill in the backyard as my uncle and their friends came over to eat food, drink, socialise and enjoy each other’s company. And over the course of the mid-90s, the people would get more frail, the crowds would get more sparse, and eventually it was just my dad, my uncle, myself, and maybe one or two others. AIDS had decimated their entire friend group.
That’s a lot of grief to hold for my dad and uncle, and others who lived that life, watching their friends leave this mortal coil to AIDS. Thank goodness we had the AIDS Memorial Quilt.
The AIDS Memorial Quilt had made its way to DC several times over the 1990s and 2000s, taking up the entire National Mall. Patches from groups, organizations, and loved ones were stitched together to memorialize our lost friends and family. To see this massive quilt take up the entire Mall can be crushing, but to see others grieving but remembering, crying but also laughing and sharing stories always struck me as the most genuine memorial. Erecting a statue or naming a park is one thing, but a quilt is something made my people who love you, something that provides warmth and comfort. It’s a big hug from granny or auntie. The AIDS Memorial Quilt acted like a big hug from those lost and from those still here to provide warmth for all of us.
For Pride 2025, I dedicate this coffee to Tony, all the friends from our backyard cookouts, to Pedro, to Ryan, to Rock Hudson, to your lost friends and family, your lost coworkers and acquaintances. We’ve come a long way where now HIV is no longer a death sentence. That’s a great thing. We owe it to those we’ve lost to remember them and honor them this Pride and beyond.