Bloggle

Sasha Paulsen writes, in the Napa Valley Register:

I would venture that when God needs a cup of coffee to get going in the morning, he would probably opt for this one, which might explain its scarcity.

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US $130 a pound. Green. Wowsers.

La Esmeralda has done it again… not only winning the Best of Panama competition four years in a row, but thrashing the competition in a bidding war that drove its price to dizzying heights, topping all other competition lots by a factor of 10. If you’ll recall, this coffee is the entirely unique and stunning Gesha cultivar that was discovered on the Esmeralda farm just a few years ago.

Congrats to the winning group… an alliance of 49th Parallel Roasters, Coffee Klatch Roasting, Groundwork Coffee Company, Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea, The Roasterie, Willoughby’s (Roastmasters.com) and Zoka Coffee Roasters.
(more…)

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Hacienda La Esmeralda works its magic for the second year in a row.

In today’s “Best of Panama” Specialty Coffee online auction hosted by the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) and the Specialty Coffee Association of Panama, green specialty coffee beans from the Hacienda La Esmeralda estate sold to Volcafe Specialty Coffee, LLC for the extraordinary price of US$20.10 a pound. The winning bid is due to the high quality of this prize-winning coffee, which was sought by several bidders. In comparison, commercial-grade coffee currently trades in commodity markets for around US$1.20 a pound. Specialty coffee is defined as a coffee that has no defects and a distinctive flavor in the cup.

Hacienda La Esmeralda recently won first place at the SCAA’s Cupping Pavilion competition in April 2005 and first place at the Rainforest Alliance Cupping competition in 2004. Last year, coffee from Hacienda La Esmeralda set an online coffee auction record when it sold for US$21 dollars a pound.

Who, you might ask, is this buyer… this Volcafe? One of world’s largest coffee traders, Volcafe buys and sells some 15% of the planet’s coffee supply. All this goes to say that, it’s possible some of this year’s top auction lot may show up at a roaster near you… And if it does, you’ll pay dearly for it.

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If you’re a coffee hound you’ve no doubt heard the Geisha story by now… A coffee grower in Panama finds a little-known and slightly mysterious coffee cultivar growing on his farm, takes it to auction and scores the highest price ever paid for green coffee. A one-in-a-lifetime Cinderella story, right? Maybe not.

The spectacular success of the Geisha at auction is a celebrated event to be sure… but it’s discovery wasn’t entirely accidental. It was the result of a new farm owner’s systematic approach to learn just what his crop was made of. Selective sampling throughout the farm revealed that one far-flung corner was planted with a peculiar (for Panama, anyway) long-bean varietal with astonishing taste characteristics and aroma; sweet, intensely fragrant, and superbly balanced. It was overlooked — forgotten, really — because it was a low-yield variety in one of many growing regions that had been replanted with higher-yield coffee trees.

The Geisha story underlines one of the essential issues of specialty coffee today: whether to grow high-yielding cultivars for greater volume, or low-yield plants that produce higher — sometimes substantially higher — quality. We can only hope that growers are finally learning that quality rules.

Last year’s fairy tale coffee tree is now being cultivated by the thousands on farms all over Panama, but it will be perhaps another three years before we learn just how this variety produces outside of that tiny little corner of the Boquete valley. Meanwhile, farmers in neighboring countries — Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Guatemala — are clamoring for some of those golden beans. For now, Panama isn’t parting with them.

Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It could be that the Geisha is especially intolerant of disease or pests. It could be that, planted elsewhere, the cultivar is no more remarkable than any other Bourbon coffee. (Mind you, simply removing those latter-day high-yield hybrids and replanting with Bourbon would be a wonderful thing!)

Me, I’d like to think there could be other Cinderella beans sunning themselves on some remote mountain slope — in Panama or elsewhere — just waiting for someone to come along and whisk them to the ball.

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