We’re excited to have just taken delivery of a lovely Gesha from Peruvian producer Maria Nila with deliciously sweet, floral notes of orange blossom and green apple. But what exactly is Gesha and why is it often also spelled “Geisha” with an i?
The Gesha coffee varietal has captivated drinkers and coffee professionals around the world since it burst onto the scene in 2004 when a farm called Hacienda La Esmeralda won the Best of Panama competition using the then-little-known variety. In the decades since, Gesha has grown in prestige to its current status at the pinnacle of the speciality coffee world.
Varieties are naturally occurring and genetically distinct subspecies of coffee — for example, if you’ve seen Caturra or Bourbon on one of our labels, this refers to the coffee variety. You can almost think of them like the fruit of another tree: Fuji, Red Delicious, and Granny Smith are all apples but they all have different characteristics, flavours, and textures.
Gesha (or “Geisha” as it was originally named, but we’ll come to that shortly) was discovered growing wild in the mountains of Ethiopia in 1936 by British colonial researchers, and made its way to Panama—and onwards to much of Latin America—via research stations in Kenya, Tanzania, and Costa Rica.
Today Geshas are renowned for their intensely floral and sweet tasting notes, and are more expensive than most coffees because of it. Interestingly the variety was originally prized for its robustness - it is tolerant to coffee leaf rust however it really thrives at high altitudes, where rust is less of an issue. But in general Gesha is quite difficult to grow and produces relatively low yields. This meant that many farmers ignored it until its renaissance in the 2000s.
The original records from its discovery list the variety as “Geisha”, which is the name it travelled with to Central America and thus what such coffees were called. There has been plenty of debate about the correct term: the fact that the variety originally hailed from the Gori Gesha forests of Ethiopia, suggests “Gesha” would be the more accurate name; but the varieties found today in Central and South America mostly came from the Panamanian transplant, and because that was listed as Geisha the spelling stuck and is still spelt that way by many producers today. To complicate things still further, a study in 2014 found the two varieties to be basically genetically identical.
The real issue comes from the other meaning of the word “Geisha” and its associated coffee marketing misuses using exoticised Japanese or otherwise Asian imagery. As writer Jenn Chen notes in an editorial for Sprudge “What some might consider a delightful homophone has become a kind of carte blanche for inappropriate appropriation - taking images and motifs associated with the Japanese tradition of art, song and dance, and using it to sell high-priced coffee”
So here at Glen Lyon we’ll be sticking with the spelling as ‘Gesha’ - hold the i!
