Last year I bought Black & White's Holiday Blend 'Tis The Season — the 2025 edition, a 12oz bag that landed on November 14. I drank it, and I kept the label. It sits in my coffee label collection, a few spots over from the Candy Hearts label that opened this series. So the 2026 edition is the rare seasonal release I can track year over year, from the buyer's side of the counter.
One thing up front, because it shapes everything below: I have not bought or tasted the 2026 bag. This isn't a cupping report. It's the next best thing a returning buyer actually has — the roaster's published recipe, read closely. Black & White publishes theirs down to the half percent, and this one rewards the reading.
Our coffee series started at the far end of the flavour map. Candy Hearts, published here on November 1, is a full-strength co-ferment — all funk, all the time, a coffee engineered to taste like candy and happy to divide a room over it. 'Tis The Season 2026 asks the inverse question: what happens when co-fermented and process-driven coffees are used as seasoning instead of the main event?
Start with the anchor. 62.5% of the blend is Lasso y Vergara — Community Project, a washed coffee from Huila, Colombia, produced by Nestor Lasso, Adrian Lasso, Jhoan Vergara, and numerous outgrowers. A washed community lot is the most conservative building block in specialty coffee: clean, sweet, familiar — there to make the cup taste like coffee first. Black & White says so themselves — the washed anchor is what softens the co-ferment funk.
Then the dose. 30% is Esteban Zamora's Cinnamon Anaerobic from Tarrazú, Costa Rica — a lot processed with cinnamon, which on its own is a loud, spiced, unmistakable coffee. At 30%, inside a washed majority, it becomes the blend's spice rack rather than its headline. And 7.5% is Sebastián Ramírez's Red Fruits co-ferment from Quindío, Colombia — just enough to lift the fruit without turning a holiday blend into an experiment.
Do the math on that recipe, because the recipe is the story: 37.5% of this bag is processed coffee. Nearly two-fifths of a blend sold as the friendly holiday option is cinnamon anaerobic and co-ferment. That is not a criticism — it is the most interesting blending decision in this year's holiday lineup, precisely because it is hidden inside the most conservative format in coffee.
Black & White's own tasting notes describe the target: spiced and sweet like a warm cinnamon roll, cooked red fruits, baked cinnamon apples and grandmother's cherry pie, milk chocolate and toasted marshmallow. They say it can be enjoyed black or with cream and sugar, by connoisseurs and casual drinkers alike. Every one of those notes maps back to a component — cinnamon carries the spice, the co-ferment the cooked red fruit, the washed anchor the chocolate base. Recipe and notes agree, which is what you want before spending money on a blend you haven't tasted.
The numbers: $28.00 for 12oz, $72.00 for 2lb, $175.00 for 5lb, all in stock as of this writing. If this blend lands on my bar, it lands on the setup in the first photo — ground on the Fellow Ode Gen 2, brewed on the Fellow Aiden. That pairing is the pot-for-a-table workflow, and a holiday blend built for mixed drinkers is its exact use case: one consistent pot the coffee person and the cream-and-sugar person can both drink without negotiating. I broke that workflow down in full in my Aiden teardown, linked below.
Now the drawbacks, because this blend has real ones and they're structural, not nitpicks. First, the design brief itself: softening is a trade, not a free win. If what you loved about Zamora's cinnamon lot was the full hit of it, you will not get that here — the edges are sanded down on purpose, and the washed anchor always wins the argument. Second, the process question. If you are a purist about fermentation additives — cinnamon in the anaerobic tank, fruit in the co-ferment — then 37.5% of this bag is coffee you object to on principle, and the label, to Black & White's credit, doesn't hide it. Know which side of that line you're on before you buy. Third, the price and the clock: $28 puts this at the top of the holiday-blend band, and it's a seasonal build. When the components are gone, the blend is gone — there is no March reorder.
Verdict: as a piece of blending, this is the smartest holiday coffee I've read this season — experimental processing dosed like seasoning inside a washed anchor, priced like the specialty coffee it is, and honest about what went into the tank. Whether it earns a place next to last year's label in the collection is a question only a bag can answer. The recipe says it should.
Next step: the brew setup this kind of blend is built for — Fellow Aiden Brew Workflow Teardown.
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