ABOUT LA MURALLA

Deciding whether to blend or keep a coffee separate often involves various factors: quality and score, marketing strategy, the creation of specific flavor profiles, or simply the novelty of isolating a lot from a particularly remote hill. At SEY, our primary focus is on showcasing clean representations of variety and terroir, which is why we work almost exclusively with single-producer, variety-separated micro lots. In this case, however, we found it more compelling to maintain varietal purity by blending multiple producers’ harvests of the same variety rather than mixing different varieties from a single producer. This 100% Gesha lot from the La Muralla neighborhood is an exceptional example of Gesha grown in one of Colombia’s most iconic terroirs: San Agustín.

ABOUT 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.