What Is Gesha, and Why Does It Cost More?
The short answer: Gesha is a coffee variety that produces very little fruit, only tastes like itself at altitude, and tastes unlike anything else. Supply is small. Demand is not. The price follows.
A coffee nobody wanted
The variety came out of the Gesha region of southwestern Ethiopia, where it was identified in the 1930s; British officials collected seed in 1936. It travelled to a research station in Tanzania, and in 1953 to CATIE in Costa Rica, which distributed it around Central America — largely because it tolerated coffee leaf rust, which mattered far more than flavour at the time.
Farmers planted it and were disappointed. The trees grew tall and gangly, the roots were shallow, and the yield was poor. Most of it was pulled out, or left at the margins of farms where nothing better would grow.
2004
Hacienda La Esmeralda, in Boquete, Panama, entered a lot of the forgotten variety into the Best of Panama competition. It scored so far beyond everything else that it reset the category, and sold for $21 a pound — an unheard-of number at the time.
Twenty-one years later, at the 2025 Best of Panama, a washed Gesha from that same farm scored 98 points and sold for $13,705 a pound. One 20kg lot went for roughly $605,000.
What it actually tastes like
Jasmine, first and unmistakably. Then bergamot and stone fruit, and a body with more in common with a good tea than with what most people mean by the word coffee. If you have only had dark roasts, the first cup can be disorienting — people often say it does not taste like coffee at all. That is the point.
Why the price is real and not hype
The tree gives less. Gesha grows tall on a small root system and simply is not very productive. A hectare that would fill sacks with Caturra gives a fraction of that in Gesha.
It needs altitude. Grown low, the florals thin out and you have spent Gesha money on ordinary coffee. That confines it to a narrow band of expensive land.
It is fragile. Tolerant of leaf rust, but susceptible to coffee berry disease and to nematodes — and a tall, brittle tree suffers in wind.
It takes patience. Years pass between planting and a harvest worth selling. A farmer who chooses Gesha is making a bet several seasons out, on a tree that may never pay.
What we do not sell
Let us be straight with you: we do not sell $13,705-a-pound coffee. Nobody drinks that coffee. It is bought by roasters and collectors, brewed once, and photographed.
What we buy are small lots of the same variety, grown by families who plant Gesha because they believe in it — Los Alpes in Nueva Segovia, Guardian del Bosque in the Peruvian Amazonas, the slopes of Acatenango. They cup in the high 80s and low 90s. They cost us several times what ordinary specialty green costs, and a small fraction of what the auction lots do.
What $25 buys
A 125g bag is about eight cups. That is roughly $3 a cup, roasted the Saturday before you drink it and handed to you on Sunday by the person who roasted it. The cafe at the bottom of the hill charges more than that for a latte.
How not to waste it
The most common way to be disappointed by an expensive coffee is to brew it like a cheap one.
- Rest it. Give a dry-process lot 10-20 days off the roast date. It tastes closed and boozy before that, and opens up after.
- Grind coarser than you think, and use water just off the boil, around 94C. Gesha gives up its florals easily; over-extract it and you will bury them.
- Skip the milk, at least for the first few cups. Everything you paid for lives in the aromatics.
- Drink it as it cools. Gesha changes more between hot and warm than almost any other coffee. The jasmine usually arrives on the way down.