Gesha Village GVA 11 - Ethiopia, Friedhats | 250g

Look, if you say your coffee is “the most celebrated coffee in the world” (quote) we would normally probably not even cup a sample. But Gesha Village, for better or worse, is kind of hard to ignore. And that’s not because of their marketing department. It’s because the idea behind this farm is pretty cool, the people behind it are pretty cool as well and yes, the coffee… pretty cool. This is why we ended up bidding at their auctions. Bidding and buying at an auction: exactly.. pretty cool. And also a bit boring. Anyway, gesha village is a project that started around ten years ago with Willem Boot, Adam Overton and Rachel Samuel. Willem Boot, born in the Netherlands now living in California, was an early adapter of “gesha-coffee”. In the beginning all the prize-winning geshas were from Panama, but Ethiopia was (and probably will always be) the promised land for coffee. So Willem decided he was going to build a farm in Ethiopia, growing only gesha. Willem is the kind of guy that does what he says and says what he does, so thanks to him and Rachel and Adam we now have the perfect variety grown in the perfect place. 

Ok, cool but what does it taste like?

The auction this year had “27 exceptional auction lots”: 18 natural, 4 washed and 5 honey. They’ve categorised them further in: Farm Reserve (GVA) Champions Reserve (GVA.RSV) and Flavor Expressions (GVA.FE)  Flavor Expressions means they did some experiments during processing, Farm Reserve is for the roasters willing to spend a lot of money and Champions Reserve is for roasters willing to spend even more money. It’s not like these are 27 completely different coffees though. They all taste a bit like gesha and they all taste a lot like Ethiopia. Which is great of course (: Gesha Village also has a normal line-up of coffees, but the auction features their best scoring lots. We’ve managed to buy two lots: GVA.11 and FE.5

The GVA.11 is a classic natural that is so clean that I would have also believed that it’s washed. It has the black tea and citric notes typical for Ethiopian coffee, it’s clean floral and sweet like a true gesha, and the natural process gives it some creamyness and notes of raisins and apricot.