Cerro Azul, Geisha Honey

One of the earliest introductions of the Geisha variety from Panama to Colombian soil has been attributed to Rigoberto Herrera, who commenced CGLE’s Geisha growing chapter around 15 years back, when he decided to plant this highly sought-after, luxury variety in their farms, after his Panama project, La Carleida, won at the Best of Panama.

Geisha is a rare coffee variety with an extremely delicate root system that requires the perfect alignment of climatic, agronomic, and temporal factors in order to thrive and bear cherries with the level of complexity and flavor clarity coffee champions and discerning specialty coffee connoisseurs appreciate best.

While its exceptional cup quality potential has pre-eminently been recognized in association with Panama since debuting in the global luxury coffee scene in 2004, by way of the Best of Panama Auction, Geisha has also triumphantly been acclimatized to idyllic coffee-growing terrains in Colombia by the elite and progressive among specialty coffee producers, such as Café Granja La Esperanza.

To direct Cerro Azul Geisha’s cup profile toward clearly layered acidities interlaced with the distinct sweetness of fresh fruits in season, complemented by a remarkably tropical character and a pleasing syrupy mouthfeel, a Honey post-harvest processing method was used.

Having collected only properly ripe cherries at 17-18 on the Brix meter from pickers who had been trained to eyeball and then hand-harvest the cherries at these levels, the cherries were manually segregated at least three more times. Sorters used visual and tactile cues to re-check the level of ripeness, and then proceeded to separate what they determined to be the good ones from the rest.

Only these good, ripe cherries went into flotation, whereby floaters were removed and what remained were de-pulped and then, with mucilage attached to the beans and without washing, they underwent two-phased drying, first on the patio and then in silos.