Nobody was looking for it.
The thing about some of the best discoveries — they don’t announce themselves. They sit quietly in the forest, doing what they’ve always done, waiting for someone with enough sense to pay attention. Geisha (or Gesha) coffee is no different. For centuries, it grew wild and largely unbothered in the highlands of southwestern Ethiopia, in a forested region called — and this matters, so remember it — Gesha. Not geisha. Not a reference to Japan. Not a marketing invention. This place, this forest, belongs to Ethiopia. A living, breathing area of land that the coffee world would eventually lose its mind over.
In the 1930s, British colonial agronomists stumbled upon it during expeditions through Ethiopia’s southwest, collected seeds, and sent them off to research stations in Kenya and Tanzania. The irony is that they weren’t looking for something extraordinary. They were looking for disease-resistant strains to fight coffee leaf rust, the fungal plague that had already devastated crops worldwide.
From those African research stations, the seeds eventually made their way to the Tropical Agricultural Research Center in Costa Rica in the 1950s, distributed under the unglamorous code name VC496. From there, the Panamanian government received some and distributed them to farms in a small highland town called Boquete.
And then nothing happened. For decades.
The plants sat on those farms as little more than a novelty — an interesting addition to the existing varieties, but not given much attention or significance. Farmers mostly grew them as hedges. As fillers. As something to do with a corner of the land. Meanwhile, back in Ethiopia, the original trees continued to grow in the Gori Gesha forest, wild and ancient, completely indifferent to their future importance.
Then, in 2004. Hacienda La Esmeralda in Boquete, Panama — a family farm that had been quietly tending to these peculiar, lanky plants for years — entered their Gesha into the Best of Panama competition. The judges tasted it and, by most accounts, did not know what to do with themselves. They were astounded by the coffee’s floral, tea-like aroma and lively brightness. It tasted like jasmine. Like bergamot. Like something you’d expect to find in a perfume bottle, not a coffee cup. It tasted like nothing they had tasted before.
It broke the record for the most expensive coffee ever sold at the Best of Panama — and the coffee world has never been the same since.
Today, Gesha is grown across Panama, Ethiopia, Colombia, Guatemala, and Costa Rica. But its soul — its genetic blueprint — belongs to one place. A forest in southwestern Ethiopia that most people couldn’t find on a map. Every cup of extraordinary Gesha coffee is, at its core, a cup of Africa. A cup of somewhere old and wild and largely unimpressed with how famous it’s become.
That’s the kind of origin story worth knowing before you take the first sip. This week, we will explore the world of Gesha, culminating in our exclusive Gesha tasting on Sunday, June 14th.