Importer: FORWARD Coffee
Price Paid per LB after Roasting: $7.54
Volume Purchased: 360kg
Origin: Ethiopia
Farm: Gesha Village
Process: Washed
Harvest Date: August-September
Tasting Notes: complex florals, sweet tea, lemon, tangerine
In the far western reaches of Ethiopia, mere kilometers from the South Sudanese border, lie the dense, wildly sprouting jungles of West Omo zone. It’s a place of stunning natural beauty, where from a high-extending plateau one can take in the expanse of the ancient, sprawling forest. This breathtaking landscape is home to Gesha Village Coffee Estate, the 471-hectare coffee farm we have built from the ground up over the last eleven years. This has been our labor of love, and we’re extremely proud to be producing coffees as awe-inspiring as our surroundings.
Rachel Samuel—one half of our partnership—was born in Ethiopia, but we discovered the country anew when we came here in 2007 to make a documentary about Ethiopia’s amazing coffee. During this process, we developed a passion for the country, its people, and its coffee industry. That path quickly led us to Willem Boot, the San Francisco Bay Area-based coffee educator well-known for his passion for the Gesha variety. As Willem taught us the fundamentals of growing and evaluating coffee with a quality focus, the shadow of Gesha loomed large over our conversations.
We soon returned to Ethiopia to find suitable land to launch our coffee venture growing Gesha. For months we searched for the perfect spot—one with high elevation, ample rainfall, temperate climates, and other crucial natural factors needed to produce coffee of excellent quality. We found it in West Omo. The untouched landscape provided us with the unique opportunity to build the coffee farm of our dreams from the ground up. But it also offered us a one-of-a-kind experience: close proximity to the Gori Gesha forest, the variety’s birthplace and site of the Panamanian Geisha discovery in the 1930s. Close proximity to the Gori Gesha forest, the variety’s birthplace and site of the Panamanian Geisha discovery in the 1930s.
We quickly got to work, harvesting a seed selection of wild Gesha plants from the Gori Gesha forest. With that prized stock in hand, we then spent month after tireless month turning our remote piece of land into a working coffee farm, capable of producing some of the world’s best Gesha coffee. In the process, we have been helping to create a coffee industry in Gesha’s birthplace. Western Ethiopia has historically been largely disconnected from the global specialty-coffee market, but now world-class Gesha coffee is available just a stone’s throw from where the variety originated.