Good morning and welcome to today’s review and the first for 2022! To start the year off I’m checking out my first Honduran geisha, something more accessible for a lot more people, so let’s dive right in!
Theodore’s Coffee Roasters website
Purchase this coffee for $40/12oz
THEODORE’S COFFEE ROASTERS EMPERADOR
What better way to start off 2022 that with Theodore’s Coffee Roasters? Theodore’s has been supporting KC Coffee Geek with coffee from the beginning, and as a consequence I have tried a ton of their coffee and have yet to find one I didn’t like! Theodore’s was founded in 2013 by Darwin Pavon, whose background is in coffee agriculture via his profession of agronomy. Darwin was born in Honduras and his on-the-ground presence with farmers all over Central and South America has given him some unique opportunities with making relationships with growers. In 2021 Theodore’s Coffee Roasters moved from the Flint, Michigan area to Zeeland on the west coast of the state, about 10 minutes from where I used to live, and they’ve also introduced a new look to their packaging, with nice black bags that have a splash of color. I think they look great!
This morning, I’m checking out Theodore’s Emperador, a geisha (aka gesha… there’s no “correct” spelling in English from the Ethiopian town’s name, so either works) variety grown in Darwin’s native Honduras. So as not to bias my palate (or bury the headline), I want to share my tasting notes for this coffee, then we’ll get into more about what geishas are, why they are pricier than other coffees, and some more detail about this coffee from Theodore’s Coffee Roasters.
I’m using my standard pourover method for this coffee, which is a 1:16.5 ratio of 22g of coffee to 363g of Third Wave Water. I’m using a Trinity Origin dripper, which is basically like any other three-holed flat bottom dripper. This one uses Kalita 155 size filters and I pulse pour my water through a Melodrip, which is supposed to keep the coffee bed agitation to a minimum during brewing. My grinder is an Orphan Espresso Lido 3. This coffee took about 4:15 including a 30 second bloom.
The aroma from the cup is nice. I’m getting a lot of chocolate-like notes here and it feels really inviting to me. Taking a sip, there is a big explosion of flavor on my palate that was hiding from the aroma. There’s a lot going on here, so I’ll try to parse it out if I can, but this coffee has an interesting “feel” to it with the flavors, too, in that they seem like they really drill into my palate. Sometimes coffees feel like they are more of a coating across my palate, or have a pretty fleeting presence while being tasted, but this one seems to really drill in and it has an intensity that stands out for me. In the initial part of the sip I’m getting a lot of citrus notes and a panela sugar-like sweetness (think unrefined sugar, so not quite brown sugar, but with more character than white sugar still). The citrus is really intense for me and I’m getting some grapefruit here as well as blood orange. This will sound weird, I know, but if I hold the coffee in my mouth and employ some retronasal breathing (puffing air out through my nose while holding the coffee in my mouth) there is a dankness to the coffee that reminds me of cannabis. As the cup cools there is some green apple I’m picking up on and there’s also a slightly savory note to the cup that is giving me slight tomato vibes, although I wouldn’t say I’m getting any tomato flavor here per se. Anytime I’m getting fruity and savory together I think my brain defaults to “tomato” but I did get a big tomato soup hit from the Origin as the coffee was blooming, too. As the cup is approaching room temperature the citrus is changing into more of a lime acidity for me and in the finish I’m getting some strawberry, too, although I wouldn’t call this a berry-forward cup at all. The aftertaste of this coffee lingers for a long time and I’m getting a vaguely tobacco-like note in the minutes between sips.
This coffee is a banger, for sure! It’s way different from the other geshas I’ve had, mostly Panamanian and Colombian, I believe. Not only is the intensity something special for this coffee, but it has a lot of complexity and depth. Some of the best and most expensive geshas I’ve had are delicious but also tend to be somewhat one-dimensional, having a big floral presence or a primary flavor note that really carries through the entire cup. This Emperador seemed to change for me with almost each sip, and there are some really unique and interesting things going on in the cup. At the same time, it’s delicious and should appeal to a wide variety of coffee drinkers. The intensity of this cup was something I really enjoyed, but also gave me a bit of palate fatigue, so I would have trouble drinking several cups of this at a time, but for a single cup pourover, I couldn’t be happier.
More About the Coffee
As I said, this coffee is a geisha variety and the first I’ve had from Honduras. It was grown by the Caballero family, whose farms are in Chinacla, La Paz, Honduras. They grow geisha at their highest elevation, generally, of about 1500masl. This is a washed coffee and Theodore’s gives us tasting notes of “Coffee honey, cedar, cacao nibs, apples and berries, fruity acidity, sparkly, clean cup and bright refine acidity!” I wonder if the cedar was what I was reading as that cannabis-y note? In any case, I feel pretty good about my tasting notes compared to Darwin and gang’s! There is a video below of a visit to the Caballero farm in Honduras, well worth the watch. The Caballeros have been growing geisha on their farm since about 2012 and they’ve won the Honduran Cup of Excellence auction in the past for their geisha coffee. They are quite experimental with their methods and have even gone so far as to separate each day’s pickings into separate lots, revealing that the intensity and flavors of the coffee from the same trees can vary day to day during the harvest. Coffee never ceases to amaze!
At $40 for a 12oz bag, this coffee is obviously priced at over double what most bags go for on average here in the USA, but as far as geishas go, this is pretty affordable. Theodore’s usually offers a short-run of the top-of-the-line Panamanian geisha every year that can run A LOT more than this in price, so $40 for 12oz is well-priced and, frankly, for me I’d rather have this coffee at $40 than a $70 geisha that is more unidimensional. To summarize the geisha story, it’s a variety that has grown forever around the Ethiopian village of Gesha. It was brought to Central and South America in the 1950’s-ish era because of it’s leaf rust resistance and promptly forgotten about. In the late 1990’s or early 2000’s, the Peterson family noticed they had some gesha growing in one of their farm plots and for the first time isolated those trees into their own lots. They blew away the Panamanian Cup of Excellence that year and people went absolutely bonkers for geisha, driving the prices through the roof. The coffee is pretty unique when grown in the right conditions, and for many years all the coffee competitors used microlots of geishas that were super rare and hard to get, so this drove prices even further. While things have calmed down quite a bit, geshas still occupy the highest prices in most coffee auctions and you’ll see high prices on them across the board, usually, when offered by roasters.