STiR coffee and tea magazine

STiR coffee and tea 29 high quality Co f f e e that TasTes like fresh brewed the integrated extraCtion system i n sta nt Naturally Visit us at Café Asia Singapore February 20-22, 2020 www.flavourtech.com "You might spend your whole life occasionally encountering one or two [floral and/or fruit] notes together in a really great coffee… [but with a top Geisha] "you encounter a whole sym- phony of these notes in one cup." Others have cited lime, honeysuckle, and papaya tones, and Willem Boot, who operates two prize-winning Gesha-growing farms near Boquete adds "rose, jasmine, and bergamot notes." This unique coffee has as history as rocky as Panama itself, the varietal being brought to Panama by aforementioned Eng- lish sea captain from the Gesha region of Ethiopia in the late 1800s. The seeds were later sent to the CATIE research center in Costa Rica and then to Panama around 1963 in the hope that the hardy plant would resist endemic coffee leaf rust, Ojo de Gallo and borer beetles. The farmers found it survived the challenges but didn't yield much. They observed that the coffee lacked flavor. It was pretty much forgotten for four decades, many of the plants be- ing uprooted or cleared, and the paltry yield blended with other varieties. Only a casual and serendipitous occurrence launched Geisha's spectacular comeback. In the early 2000s Price Peterson of the Hacienda Esmeralda decided to seed some plants at his high-altitude Jaramillo Farm, an area of mineral-rich volcanic soil. When the first beans were harvested, processed and tasted in 2004, the Geisha phenom- enon exploded. The first harvest won the top prize – and price - at that year's Best of Panama (BoP) competition, went on to win repeatedly, and the rest is history. Peterson, whose grandfather Rudolph Peterson began coffee farming in the region in 1967, also owns the Canas Verde farm which also broke BoP records in 2017. On their El Velo Farm in Alto Quiel, they have planted Geisha as well as other varieties including the naturally low-caf- feine Laurina, Salvadoran Pacamara, Guatemalan Mocca, and Kenyan SL-28. The Petersons are going beyond just commercializing the rock-star Geisha variety, they have returned to Geisha's roots in Ethiopia to cultivate and optimize other hardy resistant varieties from that country, collecting more than 400 Ethiopian varieties in a long-term project to explore new disease-resistant coffees that produce an excellent cup, and are commercially sustainable. The Lamastus family is the third-generation owners of the Elida Estate, (2018 BoP winner for both washed and natural Geisha) and record-holder for its highest scoring coffee, also going a long way to put Panama on the coffee map of the world. In a way, the Petersons are the poster family for the expat origins of coffee cultivation in Panama. Other well-known farms descended of expats are the Scottish founded Kotowa Coffee es- tate, and the Torcaza Estate in Volcan Baru, bought by Swedish immigrant Carl Janson in the 1940s and still owned and run by his sons and more recently, Finca Dos Jefes, bought in 2003 by Dee Harris and Rich Lipner. Boquete and Volcán-Candela lie in the mountainous western province of Chiriqui, by far the main production zone (74.2% of the total national harvest in 2016-2017), with elevations ranging from 2,300-3,500 feet (700-1,070m), perfect topography, plen- tiful fresh water and lush and varied fauna providing shade and biodiversity; volcanic soil and the right humidity levels.

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