Gesha.

The road out of Ethiopia

Seed was collected from coffee forest in southwestern Ethiopia in the 1930s, near a mountain rendered in English as Gesha. It went to the Lyamungu station in Tanzania, then to CATIE in Costa Rica in 1953, where it was logged as accession T2722, and on to Panama in the 1960s for its tolerance of leaf rustLeaf rustHemileia vastatrix, la roya: the fungus that strips arabica of its leaves. Colombia's breeding programme exists to resist it, which is why Castillo and Tabi carry Timor Hybrid lines.More →. Farmers there mostly left it alone. The branches were brittle and the yield was poor.

Hacienda La Esmeralda entered it into Best of Panama in 2004 and set a then-record auction price of around twenty-one dollars a pound. The variety had been in the country for forty years before anyone thought to cup it separately.

The East African leg of that journey is asserted more often than it is documented. The house says via East Africa rather than naming a country and a year it cannot stand behind.

One name, several plants

Gesha in the market is a loose grouping of genetically different plants that happen to share a name and a region of origin. Inside that grouping the T2722 line is genuinely distinct and uniform, and can be checked against a reference genotype.

The number worth knowing: work published in Frontiers in Plant Science in 2026 found that only thirty-nine per cent of samples submitted globally as Gesha matched the Gesha reference. The majority of coffee sold under the name is not, genetically, the thing named. It is the clearest argument there is for buying on the cup and the lot recordLot recordThe house's own account of a lot: ground, grower, process, harvest, score and who scored it. A record kept by the house, not an independent grading.More → rather than the word on the bag.

Both spellings are defensible. Gesha follows the Ethiopian place name, Geisha follows the germplasm record. The house writes Gesha and does not treat the other as an error.

In Colombia

Café Granja La Esperanza leased land in Boquete in 2007, won Best of Panama with Gesha in 2008, and brought seed home to Valle del Cauca. Colombian Gesha has since taken the national Cup of ExcellenceCup of ExcellenceColombia's national green coffee competition and auction, held since 2005. Lots are cupped blind by national and international juries, and the scores are public.More → more than once: Gesha swept the first three places in 2018, and in 2019 a naturalNaturalDried in the whole cherry, never depulped, and hulled at the end. The slowest of the four to dry, and the one with the most that can go wrong on the bed.More → Gesha from Risaralda scored 92.71, the highest score recorded in any Colombian Cup of Excellence.

Tall, low-yielding, first crop in the fourth year, and only intermediate resistance to rust despite the reason it was first distributed. Quality is conditional on altitude and management in a way few varieties match. Gesha planted low does not cup like Gesha, and the house would rather say so than sell the name.