Guatemala Acatenango Gesha AA

We've been a buyer of this single estate Gesha for more than a decade, and their production has grown quite a bit through the years. This year we built two separate lots from the samples we tasted, totaling 130 bags! If you don't know the story of the Gesha cultivar, it is an old coffee type from Ethiopia that was brought to an experimental coffee garden in Costa Rica years ago as a specimen sample. It was distributed to a few farms for testing on small plots, but not much was thought of it until one of these, Esmeralda in Panama, separated it from the other cultivars and entered it in the national competition. It was so outrageously different, with fruited and floral character like a Yirga Cheffe coffee from half a world away. Word traveled fast, and other farms that received some of the seed started separating their Gesha coffee as well, as is the case here. The results are always a bit different: the cultivar "expresses" itself differently in terms of cup flavors at each location, influenced by weather, soil, altitude and the like. And with this coffee from the region of Acatenango, we have a Gesha cup that expresses much of that floral intensity that's become synonymous with the "Gesha" name. We've been the sole buyer of this coffee and have chosen to keep certain farm specifics to ourselves. The farm sits on the steep slopes of Volcan Acatenango between 1600 - 1700 meters and reaps the benefits of rich volcanic soil. This farm has been in the same family for a couple generations now and they've built out an impressive wet milling facility onsite as well.