Ethiopia Gesha Village 'Gaylee' Red Label

Gesha Village 'Gaylee', Ethiopia Bench Sheko, llubabor Forest, Red Label, Natural Sun-dried, 2024

Stonefruits | Mango | Passionfruit

The Ethiopia administrative boundaries have been changing since 2021 due to political restructuring. We are most familiar with coffees from the Oromia region of Ethiopia. Names that ring familiar include Guji, Bensa, Sidama, Kochere, Bale. When everything used to be under a big region known as Sidamo, it is now a shade of its former self with most of its former land restructured via racial lines under other regions. Where most of our favourite coffees come from, the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples' Regional State (SNNPR) was also further broken down in 2021 into two states/regions, namely Central Ethiopia Regional State, South West Ethiopia Regional State and South Ethiopia Regional State. 

The famous Geisha Village is in Bench Sheko (previously known as Bench Maji), a zone in the South West Ethiopia Peoples' Region of Ethiopia. At the southern edge of Ethiopia, it borders South Sudan and Kenya. Nested within ancient, pristine forests, Gesha Village Coffee Estate took more than a decade to build a sprawling 471-hectare coffee farm from the ground up. 

The story of how the village came about was unbelievable. When Ethiopia-born Rachel Samuel returned to Ethiopia in 2007 to make a documentary about Ethiopia’s amazing coffee, he renewed his love for the country and for coffee. He quickly found Willem Boot, the San Francisco Bay Area-based coffee educator well-known for his passion for the Gesha variety. They quickly returned to Ethiopia to source for a suitable piece of land to cultivate this ancient variety on an extensive scale. In West Omo, they found an untouched landscape with close proximity of a mere 20km to the Gori Gesha forest, the variety’s birthplace and site of the Panamanian Geisha discovery in the 1930s. They spared no time to harvest a seed selection of wild Gesha plants from the Gori Gesha forest. With that prized stock in hand, they then spent month after tireless month turning their remote piece of land into a working coffee farm, capable of producing some of the world’s best Gesha coffee. In the process, they created a coffee industry in Gesha’s birthplace. Western Ethiopia has historically been largely disconnected from the global specialty coffee market, but now world-class Gesha coffee is available just a stone’s throw from where the variety originated.

Today, Gesha Village has three gesha varieties - Gesha 1931, Gori Gesha and Illubabor Forest. The Illubabor Forest variety of Gesha is disease-resistant variety and was made from an expedition to the Illubabor coffee forest in 1974. The entire estate is divided into 8 blocks, with specific variety planted at each block. Gaylee is 34.8ha, from 1,916 to 1,982m. With such an arrangement, the coffees from this estate are totally traceable and each block has its unique characteristics for comparison.

This coffee is Lot 2024/014, from Growers Reserve, also known as Red Label, given the red label on its packaging. This special micro-lot accounts for 15% of the lot's production, exhibits superior flavor attributes and excellent cup quality, scoring 88 points or above on the SCA’s 100-point scale.

There are two spellings for this variety of coffee currently - gesha and geisha. Based on old letters sent out from the British Consulate in Ethiopia in 1931, 'geisha' was used as the name of the coffee area, probably based on transliteration of what was heard then. The name "gesha" also come from the transliteration of the Amharic name for the region, ጌሻ. There is a need for such transliteration because the local Kafa language in Gesha did not have a written form until the 1990s. It seems that the gesha spelling is used in Ethiopia while those from elsewhere use geisha, although some producers use gesha to indicate a variety grown from the original Ethiopian stock. Parchmen & Co adopts the spelling as  indicated by the growers.


Roast Level
We have chosen to roast this coffee very carefully and lightly so as to preserve the gesha characteristics. We have tried various roast profiles to balance the elegance against sourness from too light a roast, and not over-roasting it to develop a nutty note. As usual, the coffee will not end on a sour note and will have a medium and not a short afternote.


Brew Flavour
We are using the origami brewer on a kalita paper, at 16g @ 775 μm to 250ml of 87°C water to brew this coffee. The dry fragrance is characteristic of fruity-citrus notes. On the brew, the first impression is the intense sweetness accompanied by a mango juiciness, as the aroma of stonefruits slowly introduces itself as the coffee starts to cool. The bouquet of aroma is complex, giving a galore of citrus notes, including passionfruit and lemon. The mouthfeel is smooth and the body is medium, constantly impressing us with its cleanliness given that it is a sun-dried coffee. It is best enjoyed from hot to just before turning room temperature, maintaining its sweetness and cleanliness throughout. 

This is our brew recipe:

0th sec - Add 35g of water
30th - 120th sec - Add 85g of water to 120g
130th - 170th sec - Add 130g of water to 250g

Savouring our world in a cup!
Enjoy!