STiR coffee and tea magazine

28 STiR coffee and tea / Issue 6, 2019 (December / January 2020) W By Bethany Haye The Real Panama hen someone says Panama, the free association word has for time immemo- rial been 'canal', and more recently 'papers'. The small iguana-shaped coun- try linking Central and South America has had a tumultuous history largely shaped by those two themes: geo-strategic positioning and domestic and international corruption. Now it is associated with the height of luxury, the $250 cup of coffee. Coffee first arrived in Panama in 1742, on a ship coming from the French Carib- bean, probably from Haiti. Or with a retired English sea captain in the 1800s who settled in Panama and planted some beans collected during his botanical studies. Or in 1780 with a Spanish settler named Pedro Antonio de Ayarza, the history is debated. The first written record of coffee being planted in Panamanian territory dates from the 1780s to the 1790s, in the low-lying area of Portobello, the absolute wrong place for coffee cultivation. No one figured this out until the 1820s, when coffee was moved into the mountains of the Western Highlands and the Boquete Valley where it thrived. Independence, unification with Grand Colombia, secession therefrom, a canal, sev- eral dictatorships, an American invasion followed. Things finally quieted down after the 1999 return of the Canal to Panamanian ownership sent the economy soaring. Panama is now considered one of the most stable and reliably growing economies in the world. Average annual growth was 7.2% between 2001 and 2013, more than double the regional average, and it has been 5.6% during the last five years. In 2015, Panama topped the Gallup-Healthways Global Well-Being Index, an annual ranking of well-being based on people's sense of purpose, financial security and health, for the second year in a row. Growth is calculated at 6% 2019, and US dollars are legal tender and used for all paper currency. So, the timing couldn't have been better for the arrival of the Geisha phenomenon. Geisha madness In case you've been in a sensory-deprivation tank for the last 10 years, Geisha is the world's most expensive coffee, with Klatch Coffee of San Francisco charging $75 (that's USD) a cup – and that was before the price went from $803/pound at the May 2019 Best of Panama (BoP) auction to $1,029/pound at the July auction – and, this just in, in September 2019, a Dubai retailer paid $10,000 for a kilo of Ninety Plus's prototype of a new Geisha strain. It will retail at $250 per cup. Just in case you may not get around to tasting a $250 cup of java in this lifetime, Ric Rhinehart of the SCA describes the flavor this way: 2005 93,000 -11.4 % 2006 80,000 -14.0 % 2007 95,000 18.8 % 2008 96,000 1.1 % 2009 45,000 -53.1 % 2010 53,000 17.8 % 2011 37,000 -30.2 % 2012 30,000 -18.9 % 2013 27,000 -10 % 2014 24,000 -11.1 % 2015 12,000 -50 % 2016 15,000 25 % 2017 27,000 80 % 2018 28,000 3.7 % 2019 25,000 -10.7% 2020 25,000 0.00 % Green Coffee Exports (60-kilo bags) Source: US Department of Agriculture

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