They say that the first cup of coffee in the morning is the best. Never was this truer than on this particular morning ...





That's me at sunrise earlier this year, having hiked to the top of Volcan Baru, the highest point in Panama and the slopes on which some of the most highly sought after geisha* coffee on earth grows. Coffee people are some of the most lovely, welcoming people on earth and I was thrilled to be able to visit a few incredible farms. In one of those photos, I'm drinking Hacienda la Esmeralda's Trapiche Yeast A Enero lot. In another, I'm drinking Ninety Plus Geisha Estate's Stefanos Domatiotis selection.

This was really a crazy moment, and since ponying up for an EK43 at home, I decided this year that I'm going to try as much geisha coffee as I can, in the hopes that I can learn something about it. I have been meaning to actually get some posts up and now the year is nearly over, so I'm not going to let perfect be the enemy of done and you will see a combination of quick-and-dirty (but reliable) coffee reviews, opinion and farm visits trickle onto this thread.

*And is it "geisha" or "gesha"? I'm going to go with gesha and not get into it!

Edit: That didn't last long! I got into it below and edited to geisha.

Willem Boot, and many of the famous Panamanian farmers are rather particular about the spelling of geisha/gesha. I honestly don't really think anyone cares that much. We know what is being referred to, so beyond that, it's just a pointless argument.

Cool pics!

Someone that should know said the word is actually Gesha, from the village in Ethiopia where it originated, but the person that first discovered and exported it added an "i". So if we go with the premise that he who discovers gets to name, then it's geisha.

So Gesha is the name of the village, Geisha is the name of the coffee varietal.

Is a coffee from Gesha Village necessarily a geisha coffee? Not being a wiseass, genuinely curious...I didn't realize they might be the same thing, when I had a coffee recently from gesha village!

Luca,

Awesome photos! That looks amazing and exhilarating!

I look forward to your reviews.

TomC wrote:Willem Boot, and many of the famous Panamanian farmers are rather particular about the spelling of geisha/gesha. I honestly don't really think anyone cares that much. We know what is being referred to, so beyond that, it's just a pointless argument.

Cool pics!

There are those who care:

https://sprudge.com/stop-calling-it-gei ... 36137.html

With transliteration there isn't really a right way to spell things. Since the original word is written in a different writing system, it is just a judgment call how best to render it in Latin script. This is compounded by the fact that different languages can have vowel sounds that don't quite match up with our expectations. From what I've read the sound of the original word is somewhere in between geh-sha and gay-sha, which seems to be the source of this silly debate.

Is it "geisha" or "gesha"?

Well, I was kind of trying to avoid this and I will continue in my theme of trying to avoid it. I figure the people who have the most skin in the game are SCAP and the prominent producers:

SCAP uses "geisha" eg.: http://scap-panama.com/bop2017/

Esmeralda uses "geisha" eg.: http://haciendaesmeralda.com

Lamastus uses "geisha" eg.: https://lamastusfamilyestates.com/colle ... tate-beans

... good enough for me. I hereby flip-flop and will edit this post to use "geisha" throughout.

Edit to add: I think that the sprudge article makes some good points, but I'm not going to fight it. No doubt part of why the industry mostly adopted "geisha" instead of "gesha" is that the former is a pre-existing word that is easier to market. But let's remember that we live in a world where many roasters use the phrase "specialty coffee" and serve stuff that really isn't very good; indeed, it's not rare to see roasters trying to adopt the marketing language of people who do a better job in order to sell coffee that they have clearly paid much less for and which is not very good quality. Who hasn't tasted past crop coffee sold at full tilt retail prices? If we're going to argue about language, there are more pernicious, borderline misleading and deceptive, practices to focus on than "geisha" vs "gesha". So I'm going to pick and choose the windmills that I charge at. After all, the one thing we know about the internet and social media is this: someone will always be wrong!

That escalated quickly ...

We all know that brewing serious coffee at home is a slippery path. Early this year, I found myself confronted with a tiny bag of Ninety Plus' lot 227, which, at least at one point, had the distinction of fetching the highest green prices in the world:

https://dailycoffeenews.com/2017/10/26/ ... nervation/

I took a look at it on the shelf at a great local cafe, Admiral Cheng Ho, and baulked at the price. In the space of about a minute, I had myself convinced the only rational thing to do was to buy it.

As soon as I took it home, I ran it through a traditional cupping at home with a few friends. To my eternal regret, I didn't take good notes, but would describe it something like this: roses, raspberry, balsamic vinegar, mushroom, sweet, balanced. Score-wise, it was balanced and complex, so we are talking over 89 points. As the cupping bowl hit room temperature, I drank it.

Having spent a ridiculous amount of time and money on coffee equipment, I felt the need to try to brew this as well as possible for a bunch of friends and threw it in the freezer to have them over a week or two later.

Here we see the immediate and obvious problem with geisha coffees: they floor everyone on the cupping table when they unleash a charm offensive of complex aromas, but that seldom makes it through to the cup in traditional brewing methods. So how do you get all of the flavour from a cupping bowl into the cup? Well, the obvious answer is that you brew them as a cupping bowl and just drink that. I'm yet to find a better solution than the bleeding obvious.

So why don't cafes brew this way? Well, it's totally impractical. By the time you have ground, steeped, broken the cup, skimmed and filtered, it's going to be 15 minutes from the customer's order, you will have a bench full of bowls lined up with overlapping timers, a sink full of dishes and your customers will be irritated about what is taking so long. Much better to pour through a v60, run it out to the customers and neatly turf the paper filter and grounds in one fell swoop.

I decided that having the coffee at home would allow me to brew it in the best way possible, free from the constraints of having to brew it in a way that makes sense in a cafe. I had a try of a few different brewing methods with a few other coffees and decided that the espresso machine is probably somehow the best shot at extracting all of the aroma and complexity from such a coffee. I mean, we all know it's pretty easy to over-extract through it! So somewhere between the brewing conditions for filter and the brewing conditions for espresso must lie a set of brewing conditions that produce a great filter type brew. Without enough experimentation to really be confident, I decided that the most likely candidate recipe was: 15g/6.5 grind setting (for reference, I use about 9.5 for french press and 1.8-3.0 for espresso)/6 bar (no ramp up, but 0.5mm gicleur in head)/89C, with a cloth filter cut to size to fit a VST15g basket:



This yielded about 180g of liquid in about 25 seconds, which I diluted to about 240g, bringing it closer to the old SCAA type brew ratio of 55g/L. I'd guess that the resultant brew ended at about 1.4% TDS, but that's a total guess.



Yes, it looks fast at that flow rate!

We served the coffee in some glasses with a much narrower top than bottom to try to magnify the aroma:




... so with so much effort, opinion and expenditure in it, surely my ego will not allow me to say it was anything less than the most incredible thing ever? Unfortunately for me, no; I think I buggered it up.

The brews were a little dull/muddy and the most distinctive flavours were sort of raspberry, dried fig and balsamic vinegar. This coffee also had quite a distinctive umami/mushroomy flavour. I used the last of the coffee to make an espresso, which was much better - it accentuated the raspberry a bit more. I'm not convinced I ever tasted the best of it.

All of this leaves a number of pretty open-ended questions:
[*]This coffee was pretty far from a 'classic' gesha. So what, exactly, are people looking for, or thinking they are getting, when they buy gesha coffee?
[*]This coffee had a few characteristics that were definitely the result of processing. How much is processing worth paying for, particularly if similar results could be obtained if that processing method were applied to less rare and stratospherically expensive coffee?
[*]What are the best ways to extract these sorts of coffees?

More to come ...