Good morning and welcome to today’s review of Mikava’s Gesha Marsella. Mikava is a producer I’ve followed for a long time on Instagram, but this is the first coffee I’ve tried from them and it’s a relatively affordable, accessible gesha to boot! Without further ado…
Purchase this coffee for $34/250g (8.8oz) or $17/113g (4oz)
MIKAVA GESHA MARSELLA
Mikava is a coffee company with an interesting story to tell, and I encourage you to check out their website for more details so I don’t bury the headline of this coffee! The Doyle family started a cafe and roastery somewhere in the Pacific Northwest in the 1980’s. During a trip to Colombia, Paul and his son, Kevin, were inspired during a trip to Colombia to get into the growing and producing side of the coffee supply chain, and in 2013 they started their first farm, Finca Marsella, in Marsella in the the Risaralda department of Colombia. Risaralda is in central-west Colombia, in the triangle formed by Cali, Bogota and Medellin where so much of the best coffees from Colombia grow. The Doyles immediately began planting unusual (for the area) varieties and experimenting with innovative processing methods and they took first place in Colombia’s Cup of Excellence in 2019, a huge accomplishment! Finca Marsella, where today’s coffee was grown, sits at 1710-1792 meters above sea level, nestled between three volcanoes and adjacent to a protected forest reserve. Three hectares of Finca Marsella are planted with Gesha and Enano (Dwarf) Gesha. I’ll talk more about this specific coffee and the allure of gesha, it’s pricing, etc after I share my tasting notes below with you.
My Tasting Notes
As I’ve been experimenting with on recent reviews, I’ll share my experience with you similar to the way I actually experienced it, by giving you my tasting notes first and then talking about the coffee and what the roaster has to say afterward. When I receive coffees I try to avoid looking at the labels, descriptions, websites, etc until after I’ve brewed it and taken all my tasting notes, so as not to bias my palate or my thoughts on the coffee, so I think writing my reviews in the same manner makes sense and I hope you do, too!
I’m using my standard pourover setup for this coffee, which is a 1:16.5 ratio of 22g of coffee to 363g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin dripper with Kalita 155 filter. The Origin is a flat bottom brewer and I have it set up to have three open drain holes in the bottom, like a Kalita Wave. My grinder is an Orphan Espresso Lido 3 and I pulse pour my water through a Melodrip to try to minimize any agitation of the coffee bed during brewing. This coffee got a 30-second bloom and a total brew time, including the bloom, of about 3:20.
The aroma from this coffee is very fruity and has some hits of florals in it, for me, too. I’m not great with identifying floral aromas as similar to specific flowers unless it’s something very familiar like jasmine or rose, so in this case, “floral” will have to suffice! The aroma is not that crazy, perfumed floral bomb I’ve gotten from quite a few other geshas, but it’s a nice invitation to taking a sip, for sure! Taking my first sip at a fairly warm temperature, this coffee has a light to light+ body for me and there is both a fruitiness and a cocoa note to these initial sips. I’m going to let this cool down a ways before I keep sipping as I know it’ll open up quite a bit at a cooler temp, but I always like experiencing the full temperature range of a coffee even if I know they almost all do better as they cool toward room temperature. Sure enough, with the coffee approaching my preferred temperature (warm… where I could gulp the whole cup down without fear of burning my mouth, around 105-110F), this coffee really opens up a lot. I’m getting loads of fruits here and it’s tough to separate everything out at the moment. I have apple, hints of berries and peach or apricot all hitting my palate at the same time. My first cup of this coffee about a week ago I noted that it “tastes like every fruit flavor of Jolly Rancher stuffed into my mouth at the same time!” LOL
On the front end of the sip I am getting orange or more like tangerine. I’m getting a white grape sweetness and that changes to almost a purple grape note in the finish… almost, but not quite, but grapes are definitely playing into this coffee for me and I feel like it has some wine-like attributes in the way the flavors open up and develop on my palate. There are berries here… some raspberry, some very fresh, maybe even just underripe strawberry, and in occasional sips I’m getting a hit of blueberry, too. The second half of the sip has a peach/apricot note for me. There’s the sweetness and “coolness” of peach but there is a tartness to this cup that makes me lean more heavily toward apricot here. This lingers long into the aftertaste, too, and readers know I’m always a sucker for peach and apricot notes in coffees! As the cup continues to cool I’m getting less of that cocoa note that I got from the freshly brewed coffee, but that did remind me of a really fruity small batch chocolate bar when I was getting those notes, however briefly. Even though none of these fruits are tropical, I get a very tropical vibe from this coffee as a whole. The sweetness, fruitiness and tartness all combine for me to remind me of pineapple and other tropical fruits, and there’s even a bit of pineapple here for me, of course, now that my mind drifted in that direction. This coffee has a nice, bright, tart, fruity punch right at the end and then finishes sweet and has a delightful, lingering aftertaste of grape, berries and apricot. A real delight! For all its fruitiness and brightness, this coffee remains pretty well balanced, and although I would call this a complex cup, it’s easily drinkable and doesn’t wear out my palate, either. I know $34 for just under 9 ounces of coffee is a hefty price for a lot of readers to justify, but this is a spectacular coffee that holds up very well to age (this coffee was still excellent a good 6-7 weeks off roast), in fact, Kevin Doyle recommended I let it age 4-6 weeks for optimal flavors based on the feedback they get from the competitors who use their coffees, and he would know this coffee as well as anyone on the planet! Oh, and for a natural coffee, I got zero ferment notes from this one, so if you avoid naturals for that reason I think you’d be OK with this gesha.
About This Coffee
This morning’s coffee is a Gesha variety grown in Colombia at Finca Marsella. This is a natural process coffee that is also given an extended double fermentation and carbonic maceration (I’ll explain all these things in a sec!), followed by a slow dry on raised beds in the sun. This coffee took first place in the Colombia Yara Championship in 2020 and Mikava’s gesha from their other farm, Finca Santuario, took second place! They give tasting notes of, “Raspberry, blueberry, jasmine, orange, cocoa nibs” so I am quite pleased how well my tasting notes match up with Mikava’s! It’s always nice to get some validation! Going into more detail, they have this to say about the coffee, “When first ground, aromas of green grape and plum fill the air. As you start to brew, you will notice as the water hits the bed notes of cherry and jasmine will start to emerge. You will find similar notes in the taste. In the cup, as it’s hot, a distinct raspberry note will emerge, which transforms into blueberry and jasmine as it cools. The sweetness is dense and tastes of dried fruits and milk chocolate. These flavors linger long after you’re done drinking.”
So, let’s unpack all these terms above… first of all what is Gesha? Gesha is a variety or coffee that originally came from the area around the village of Gesha in Ethiopia. This coffee changes characater, a lot, depending on where and how it’s grown, which I guess is true of all Arabica coffee. In any case, this coffee tends to be thought of as nothing spectacular in most of Ethiopia. Sometime in the mid 1900’s it made it to Central America where it was being planted because of its resistance to leaf rust, a blight that is constantly threatening coffee crops. In the early 2000’s, the Peterson family, who own La Esmeralda in Panama, separated their Gesha for the first time instead of combining it in with their other coffees and they melted the minds of the judges at multiple competitions and the Cup of Excellence. I believe it set the world record for the amount of money a lot of coffee sold for. As you can imagine, this coffee was THE HIT of the year and remained as such for a while, and in the subsequent decade or two a lot of people have planted Gesha elsewhere to cash in on the excitement. For many years, most competitors in barista and brewing competitions used Gesha coffees that were astronomically expensive and incredibly rare so that normal people couldn’t even get our hands on them. With more farms planting Gesha, the prices have come down some and they are more obtainable, like this one from Finca Marsella.
Now, for these other terms, coffee is a fruit, and the seeds inside the fruit, which is about the size of a normal cherry (and is called a coffee cherry), are what we call coffee beans. In order to get coffee from its fruit form to what is shipped to roasters all over the world, the coffee needs to be processed, so the fruit is removed, the seeds are cleaned and dried, and they are ready to roast. Natural coffees like this Gesha Marsella are hand sorted and then laid out to dry on raised beds in the sun, where the fruits slowly start to dry out and break down. Coffee beans are like little sponges that soak up flavors of anything nearby. As the coffee cherries break down, they impart flavors, usually fruits of a wide variety, to the coffee beans, as well as general sweetness and body. Once the fruits have basically dried out like big raisins, the coffees is run through machines to remove the skins and pulps and they go through a few more steps to fully clean off the seeds and prepare them to be exported. This coffee gets some other attention prior to that, called carbonic maceration. This is a type of anaerobic (free of oxygen) fermentation before the drying step that was borrowed from the wine industry. In this step, the coffee fruits are put in a tank to ferment for a while, and as this occurs all the air is either pumped out or pushed out by the carbon dioxide that forms as the fruit breaks down. This makes an oxygen-free environment and there are all sorts of ways to manipulate the conditions to encourage certain microbes to do more fermentation than other microbes, allowing the producer to try to control what sorts of flavors will be created and imparted to the coffee beans. After all this, then these coffees are laid out in the sun to dry. This is pretty sophisticated stuff, but getting more and more common among coffee growers every year. When it works, it helps produce stellar coffees like this Gesha Marsella!