This week, we have 2 beautiful washed geshas on the opposite end of the flavor spectrum. Juan Pena's Gesha, which has a delicately clean florality and laser focused acid structure and defined sugary sweetness, and El Obraje's gesha, absolutely bursting with tropical fruits, ripping acid. and tons of complexity. 

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Juan Pena's operation at Hacienda La Papaya is one of notoriety and excellence. Starting out as a rose farmer, Juan Pena began planting coffee trees and diversifying his crops after a particularly disastrous harvest. Now, 16 years after the first coffee trees were planted at La Papaya, Juan has won many awards, and is a familiar name in Barista Competitions around the world. Growing mostly Mejorado, Sidra, and Gesha between 1900-2100masl at his farm in Saraguro, the systems in place at La Papaya are highly organized and carefully engineered to pursue consistently high quality at scale. A state of the art drip irrigation system runs across all 28 acres, with a seedling nursery constantly iterating upon the current varietals and ensuring quality year over year. On top of this, there are automated soil management sensors that detect levels of different nutrients in each plot. This is our first time purchasing from Hacienda La Papaya, and we hope to continue that relationship long into the future. This beautiful washed gesha was given a short washed fermentation of just 15 hours before being dried on raised beds for around 9-18 days. In the cup, we find a clean and ripe peach tea sweetness, tons of orange blossom, and a fun little honeydew melon note through the centerline. As the cup cools, layers of florals bloom on the palate, bergamot, jasmine and magnolia dance against each other and linger softly in the finish.

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Pablo Guerrero's farm, El Obraje in Tangua just outside of Pasto, has been in his family for many years and originally began as a wheat farm. In the 1990s, the Colombian government began importing wheat, crashing the price of domestic production. During the search for a more profitable crop, Pablo planted the first coffee trees on El Obraje in the year 2000, the very first of his neighbors to do so. In 2009, Pablo built his very own wet mill and processing facility at El Obraje where he began pursuing quality improvements and selling specialty coffee. From there, he began doing fermentation experiments, producing everything from traditional naturals and washed to anaerobic and held in cherry lots. This particular washed gesha lot was a very simple process, with just 20 hours held in cherry prior to depulping and having a secondary short underwater fermentation. The resulting cup profile is bursting with an array of tropical fruits like mango and starfruit, with lovely citric undertones of meyer lemon and lime peel. A slight lemonbalm florality creeps in on the edges and lingers long after the cup is finished.