Colombia La Esperanza Gesha

Farm: Finca La Esperanza
Producer: Vanesa Castro
Altitude: 1546 masl
Variety: Gesha
Process: Semi-washed 96hr anaerobic fermentation
Region: San Pablo, Planadas, Tolima

Vanesa Castro grows coffee on just two hectares of land in the remote municipality of Planadas in the south of the department of Tolima. Planadas is a small community located in the foothills of the Cordillera Central, the highest of the three branches of the Colombian Andes, and one of the most remote coffee-growing regions in Colombia.

Finca La Esperanza sits at 1546 metres above sea level just outside of the town and all Castro’s coffee is sustainably shade-grown. Gesha is one of the world’s most highly-prized coffee varieties, winning competitions and often setting record prices at auctions. Today geshas are renowned for their intensely floral and sweet tasting notes, and are more expensive than most coffees because of it, but the variety was originally prized for its robustness. It was mostly forgotten about until 2004 when the variety won the Best of Panama auction, and in the decades since gesha has grown in prestige to its current status at the pinnacle of the speciality coffee world.

This gesha from Finca La Esperanza is an anaerobic semi-washed coffee, which means the freshly-harvested cherries are partially depulped (some of the outer fruit of the cherry is removed by a mangle-like device) and then undergo a 96-hour oxygen-deprived fermentation process before being washed and mechanically dried.

Those complex floral and sugar-sweet notes are very apparent in this coffee—we also get some juicy stone fruit—and we’ve been enjoying it as both a pour-over and filter.

For more, see our latest Journal post which explains the history and controversy of this unique coffee variety.