This remains one of our favorite Gesha profiles year after year. The seeds were initially hand-selected from a specific Gesha tree in Acevedo and planted high up in San Agustín. This harvest, we taste a more fruit-forward strawberry profile with florality and bright yellow acidity.
Gesha
Santa Monica, San Agustín
1,800 masl
March, 2024
Hand-picked at peak ripeness. Floated to further remove defects. De-pulped on the day of harvest. Dry fermented for 35 hours. Dried on raised beds for 30 days.
Working with the coffees from the famed exporter and producer Alejandro Renjifo of Fairfield Trading continues to be an honor. Alejandro has been an influential contributor to the development of Colombian specialty coffee, and works with some of the best and most well-known producers in all of Colombia. He started his own farming project a few years ago atop San Agustín, in southern Huila, and is currently producing Caturra, Typica, and Gesha.
Gesha was originally collected from coffee forests of Ethiopia in the 1930's. From there, it was sent to the Lyamungo Research Station in Tanzania, and then brought to Centro Agronómico Tropical de Investigación y Enseñanza (CATIE) in Central America in the 1953, where it was logged as accession T2722. It was distributed throughout Panama via CATIE in the 1960’s after its tolerance to coffee leaf rust was recognized. However, it was not widely planted because the plant's branches were brittle and not favored by farmers. Gesha came to prominence in 2005, when the Peterson family of Boquete, Panama, entered it into the Best of Panama competition and auction. It received exceptionally high marks and broke the then-record for green coffee auction prices, selling for over $20 per pound. Since then, the variety has become a resounding favorite of brewing and roasting competition winners and coffee enthusiasts alike.
The cost of getting a coffee from cherry to beverage varies enormously depending on its place of origin and the location of its consumption. The inclusion of price transparency is a starting point to inform broader conversation around the true costs of production and the sustainability of specialty coffee as a whole.