Peru Amazonas El Colibri Gesha Natural

Tasting Note:  Mulberry | Tangerine | Honey | Peach | Hint of Wine

 Size:  200g/1kg

Brewing Recommendation: Filter Brews / Modern Espresso 

Tangerine leads this Peru Amazonas El Colibri Gesha Natural: a bright, fruit-forward natural-process cup carrying mulberry, honey, peach and a hint of wine behind the citrus. It's grown at 1850m in the Amazonas highlands of northern Peru, on El Colibri, the farm that placed #12 in Peru's 2023 Cup of Excellence.

The farm

El Colibri sits in Amazonas, the emerging specialty region of northern Peru where the Andes start tipping into rainforest. This isn't a name borrowed for a bag: the estate placed twelfth in Peru's 2023 Cup of Excellence, the national competition that ranks a country's best lots by blind jury score. When a farm places that high, a panel of independent judges has already vouched for the cup without knowing whose coffee they were tasting.

The varietal

Gesha (also spelled Geisha) is the cup the whole specialty world chases, with a backstory to match. It's an Ethiopian landrace collected from Ethiopia's coffee forests in the 1930s, which travelled to Tanzania's Lyamungu research station and on to CATIE in Central America in 1953, where it was filed under accession number T2722. It stayed a research curiosity until the Peterson family entered it at Panama's Best of Panama in 2005, where it sold for over $20 a pound and set an auction record. Think of it as the variety that sat quietly in a seed bank for fifty years, then rewrote coffee's price ceiling overnight.

Why Gesha is a gamble to grow

Here's the catch that makes this lot notable: Gesha is genuinely hard to farm. The plant is tall and low-yielding, so a grower harvests far less per tree than a workhorse variety, and it only rewards you with its famous cup when it's grown high, above roughly 1600m. It also carries only intermediate resistance to coffee leaf rust and a soft spot for nematodes, so it asks for patience and the right altitude. El Colibri's 1850m sits comfortably in that sweet spot.

How it's processed

This is a natural, or dry-process, coffee: the whole cherry is dried with the fruit still on, letting the bean soak up sweetness and that wine-like depth. El Colibri takes it further with a method it calls River Natural, where the cherries are fermented anaerobically (sealed away from oxygen) in flowing river water that keeps the temperature low. Cool, slow fermentation is the trick to a clean cup, because gentle temperatures hold back the boozy, funky off-notes a runaway warm ferment can throw. The cherries are then sun-dried to export standard.

In the cup

Expect tangerine out front, bright and lifted, with mulberry, honey and peach filling in underneath and a hint of wine on the finish. If you know the sweet-sour pop of a ripe limau madu, that's the kind of citrus lift leading the glass. It's a sweet, fruit-forward natural that wears its provenance on its sleeve, and every cup tells a story worth following back to one Amazonas hillside.

Add a bag to your cart and give this tangerine-bright Gesha the unhurried pour-over it deserves, roasted fresh in Subang Jaya for the discerning cup.