Good morning and welcome to today’s review, a special pre-Thanksgiving (American) look at a very special coffee from one of my favorite roasters, Theodore’s Coffee Roasters in Michigan. We have a gesha!
Theodore’s Coffee Roasters website
This is an unpriced, unlisted roast-to-order coffee that is not listed on the website. Please contact info@theodorescoffee.com to inquire about the 12oz bag price and reserve your order. They have both the washed, reviewed here, and natural (review dropping next week), so ask about both.
Hacienda La Esmeralda Private Collection website
THEODORE’S COFFEE ROASTERS LA ESMERALDA PRIVATE COLLECTION GESHA (WASHED)
Pre-review commentary: Geshas are special coffees and they command a hefty price. Theodore’s is not listing these on their website, and I don’t even know the price. I do know they are taking orders for both the natural, which I’ll post a review of next week, and this washed, right now. Just email info@theodorescoffee.com for information and to reserve yours. La Esmeralda gesha coffees are very expensive, so they are a special thing to be enjoyed on occasion. I know Darwin’s profit margin on this coffee is basically nothing, so if there is any such thing as a “reasonably priced” gesha this is likely to be your best bet. It’s like a really nice bottle of wine or a top shelf scotch and gesha makes a FANTASTIC gift for a real coffee nerd who has everything. 2020 has sucked, why not finish it out with a fantastic, special coffee that is a splurge but a wonderful experience at the same time? On to the review….
It has been quite a minute since I’ve had any coffee from one of my all-time favorite roasters, Theodore’s Coffee Roasters. In fact, my last review of their coffee was back in 2018, which seems like a lifetime ago! So, when Darwin Pavon, the company’s founder, sent me a message asking if he could send a couple samples of gesha to me, I tried to play it cool… “Yeah, sure, I mean, I guess, if YOU really want to…” but as I hit “send” I was also wakling out toward my mailbox to begin my vigil for this box! LOL I’ll get into the somewhat crazy story of gesha coffee in this review, but I am bad about burying the lead, so let’s talk a little about Theodore’s and this coffee itself and then I’ll finish out about why the word “gesha” (sometimes spelled and said like “geisha” in coffee) and this coffee variety carries such incredible clout in the specialty coffee industry.
Theodore’s Coffee Roasters was started in 2014 by Darwin Pavon, who was born in Honduras and as a youth got hooked up with the Micah Project. This was an outreach program that helped boys in Tegucigalpa, Honduras develop leadership and life skills with the intent of breaking the poverty cycle. Darwin eventually got involved in a fertilizer development project that brought him into contact with many remote farmers and some of those relationships still exist today and help Darwin bring pretty special coffees from Honduras into his roaster. I’m sure there’s a heck of a lot more to this story, but long story short, Darwin ended up in Owosso, Michigan, about midway between Lansing and Flint, with a tasting room and roastery and I have absolutely loved every coffee they’ve sent me. I have a handful of “just buy anything from this roaster and you’ll like it” roasters and Theodore’s is one of them.
This morning’s coffee is from the famed Hacienda La Esmeralda in Panama. I’ll talk more about this farm after the review because their story goes hand in hand with the story of gesha coffee variety. But, La Esmeralda is made up of several farms in the Boquete, Panama region. These lands were first established as an estate in 1940 by a Swede named Hans Elliott. They were purchased and expanded by Rudolph Peterson in 1967, a Swedish-American banker looking for a retirement venture. Originally, most of the land was pasture for beef cattle, and they switched over to dairy cattle, which still makes up the use of about 1/2 of the Peterson’s estates in Pananma today. Coffee had been growing on Peterson land since 1890 or earlier and, at this point, was more or less just growing wild. In 1988, the Petersons intentionally expanded into coffee planting, and this was really in the second wave of coffee where specialty coffee as we know it today wasn’t even a thing yet, and dark roasts with milk-based sugar drinks were all the rage. Panamanian coffee was definitely a mass market, commodity venture in those days. This all changed in 2004 when the Petersons caused the specialty coffee world to lose their minds after introducing their gesha coffee at the Best of Panama auction, and I’ll pick up the rest of that story later.
This coffee itself is a washed gesha from La Esmeralda’s Private Collection. The Private Collection coffees are grown at the Jaramillo, Quiel and Cañas Verdes farms at altitudes of 1600-1800masl and they are processed as washed and natural selections. I will review the natural next week, so stay tuned for that. These Private Collection coffees are blended from the crops from these three farms for consistency, but don’t let the word “blend” throw you off here, these are all 100% gesha offerings. These coffees are the prototype floral, fruity, high citric acidity, juicy coffees that have given nigh altitude Panamanian gesha its reputation and they are some of the most expensive and highly prized coffees in the world. I have no tasting notes from Theodore’s on this coffee, but generally speaking geshas are floral, bright, fruit forward, so let’s check it out.
For this review cup I used my standard setup of a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin (flat bottom, three hole like a Kalita Wave) using a Kalita 155 filter. My grinder is a Knock Aergrind and I pulse pour through a Melodrip to minimize agitation of the brew bed. This coffee got a 30 second bloom and ran fast, coming in at a total of 3:05 including the bloom. So, you may want to tighten up your grind some for this coffee, but that being said, the aromas and flavors from this cup were fantastic, so maybe this is how it should be!
I know for most of us coffee is about the flavor, but your nose is incredibly important when it comes to the sense of taste and so aromas should not be discounted. Geshas are generally prized for their floral aromas and this one from Theodore’s has the best aromas I’ve ever gotten from a gesha and, just about any coffee otherwise. Sometimes it’s hard to pick much up in terms of aroma, but this one is INSANE in the clarity and volume of scents erupting from the cup. It even smelled awesome as I brewed and I can’t always say that about coffee… sometimes the brew aroma is meh or even somewhat unpleasant and the cup itself is fantastic. Unfortunately I am horrible with identifying specific florals, but I believe I was getting a lot of lemon, some jasmine and definitely lavendar from this cup. Even as the cup is rapidly approaching room temperature right now, the aroma is still very lively and the lemon is still very perceptible. This will sound ridiculous, but the lemon component from this gesha’s aroma reminds me of lemon Pledge, but in a good way. LOL
Taking a sip, all of those flavors and more come bursting forward. This is a medium to medium- bodied coffee for me and it’s fairly light in mouthfeel with lots of intensity in flavor. This is a bright, fruit-forward, acid-forward coffee and I know to some readers those are all scary words, but in this case it is all good. Acids in foods can be a very good thing and in coffee, it’s acidic compounds that give coffees their high-end notes and most of the fruit flavors we enjoy. Marketing from commodity coffee companies has made an unfortunate connection for Americans at least that acid + coffee = bad and that you want a “smooth,” “low acidity” cup or it’ll upset your stomach, etc etc. Most of the time this is simply untrue and it’s a way to make bland, unappealing, unexciting coffees appeal to drinkers. Geshas tend to be all about these bright, fruity, acidic notes and this is an exceptional example of that. That lemon note is here right at the front of the sip and carries through into the lingering aftertaste. I’m getting jasmine and lavendar still in the flavors, too. In the second half of the sip toward the finish and into the early aftertaste there is a hint of cocoa here for me. As the cup cools I’m starting to pick up very subtle hints of strawberry and there is a light honey sweetness to the cup that helps balance all these high notes. It’s important to note that while this gesha is all about the acids, this is not a biting, harsh cup in the least. Yes, it’s bright, but it’s sweet and fruity and there is no hint of sourness or anything harsh here.
What a great coffee! I’ve not had a ton of geshas, maybe 6-7 since I started KCCoffeeGeek.com a handful of years ago, and this is the best one I’ve had. The aromas are always fantastic from them, and they’re always delicious coffees that have been well-handled by the roasters (at the prices the green beans cost, they probably keep the bags tucked into feather beds), but my experience with geshas is that they are often sort of one-trick ponies with 1-2 dominant aromas and flavors that don’t really develop or go anywhere. This gesha seems more complex than the others I’ve had and it’s really a nice cup. Regardless of what Theodore’s charges, unless you have money to burn geshas will never be daily drinkers for 99.9% of us, but what a great experience this coffee was. The aroma itself is something I could just sit and smell for hours. There are so many incredibly good coffees out there being roasted by so many talented roasters it’s hard for me to recommend and justify geshas, but this is one I will say you should buy if you can afford it, and I know the price will be as “affordable” as it can be because this is not a moneymaker for Darwin and he pretty much sells the bags without a profit margin. Splurge on yourself or a coffee-loving loved one here at the end of the craziest year and I think you will be satisfied with money well spent!
Now, last words… what the heck is gesha and why is it expensive? To give you an idea, a lot of the REALLY good coffees you can pick up from your favorite roasters any day of the week cost around $6-8 per pound when purchased green and in small quantities. When roasters are buying a shipping container full of the stuff, they are going to get a better price, but still, think $4-6/lb for really nice specialty coffees purchased in huge quantities. La Esmeralda’s Private Collection will run around $40-$45 per pound, green. How come?
Gesha, or geisha, is a coffee from Ethiopia, named after the village it was first identified near, Gesha. Gesha is quite common in Ethiopia and has been planted all over the place now, but doesn’t seem to really show itself off until it’s in very high altitudes. So, just because a coffee is “gesha” doesn’t mean it’s going to taste awesome. Sometimes it’s going to taste like plain ol’ coffee! When the Peterson’s started planting more coffee on their estate, they acquired Jaramillo, which is their farm with the highest altitude. The coffee growing there had been devestated by leaf rust, and gesha was quite resistant to this problem, so they planted more of it at Jaramillo in the 1990’s and sort of forgot about it. Before the 2004 Best of Panama auction, the Petersons decided to do something they had never done before and separate lots of coffee from the different farms it was planted on. Prior to this, I guess they were just harvesting, combining and seeing what they had. So, this was the first time they had ever separated this high-altitude gesha from Jaramillo from their other coffee varieties. On the cupping table, they were blown away. Hacienda La Esmeralda took this gesha to the auction and won the Best of Panama competition while also breaking the world record for the price of coffee at auction. And when you see it’s something like 10x the price of other very high quality coffees, everyone took notice.
So, as you can imagine, after this 2004 event a couple things happened: first, anyone with gesha started microlotting it and everyone was in a scramble to plant it. Second, geshas from La Esmeralda became the most sought-after coffees in the world, and third, competitors in World Barista Championships and any other coffee competition were clamoring for it because this gesha is quite different from other coffees and can be leveraged into something special in competitions. So, the legend of gesha coffee was born and it continues to astound and sometimes confuse coffee drinkers the world over! This gesha from Theodore’s is fantastic and I think whatever Darwin charges will be reasonable and worth the experience to have this special coffee once this year, so go for it!