The coffee that sold, in May of this year, for six thousand and one dollars a pound — the highest price ever paid for a green coffee lot — was grown on seven hundred and fourteen trees on a single slope of Hacienda La Esmeralda, at one thousand nine hundred meters, in the Jaramillo Arriba section of the farm. It was a Geisha. It was processed as a natural. It was bought at auction by a consortium of roasters in East Asia, who divided the lot into portions small enough that a single espresso at retail will cost, depending on the roaster, somewhere between eighty and one hundred and thirty U.S. dollars.
These are not, by any reasonable historical measure, coffee prices. They are the prices of a luxury good that has entered the territory normally occupied by top-tier Burgundy, premium Japanese whisky, and a certain kind of unblended single-estate rum. The question of how coffee got there — and whether anyone should be entirely comfortable with the fact that it did — is, in the hills above Boquete, the one that nobody is asking out loud.
The rediscovery
The Geisha varietal is not from Panama. It was collected, by a British colonial mission, from the forest near the village of Gesha in southwestern Ethiopia in 1936. It was moved through research stations in Kenya, Tanzania, and Costa Rica, and arrived in Panama sometime in the 1960s as one of dozens of experimental varietals being trialed for disease resistance. It was low-yielding. It was fragile. It was, by the standards of the era, not a useful tree, and most farms that had received it had replaced it by the 1980s.
A small number of trees survived on an upper parcel of Hacienda La Esmeralda, owned by the Peterson family. In 2003, the family entered a lot separated specifically from this block into the Best of Panama competition. It scored higher than any other coffee that had ever been entered into the competition. It sold at the subsequent auction for twenty-one dollars a pound, which was, at the time, roughly four times the previous record.
“We did not know, when we planted them, that they would change what coffee cost in the world,” says Rachel Peterson, who runs the farm today with her brothers. “We only knew they tasted different.”
The slope
The Jaramillo block sits on a terrace of volcanic soil beneath the southern rim of the Barú crater, facing east-southeast, at an altitude that catches morning cloud almost every day of the year from November through February. The cloud deposits moisture on the leaves without soaking the soil. The daily temperature swing is large. The cherries ripen slowly — a Geisha on this slope may take forty-eight to fifty weeks from flower to harvest, compared to thirty to thirty-four weeks for a Catuai on the same farm.
The flavor the slope produces in this varietal is, by consensus among roasters who have cupped thousands of coffees, singular. It is almost implausibly floral on the nose — jasmine, orange blossom, bergamot — and on the palate it carries a tea-like clarity that has more in common with high-altitude Darjeeling than with any other coffee. The finish is long, cooling, and sweet, and leaves behind an aftertaste that several cuppers have described, unprompted, as “perfumed.”
It is, in other words, a coffee that tastes almost nothing like coffee. That is its appeal. That is also, unavoidably, the source of the question that hangs over it.
The price and its weather
Six thousand dollars a pound is a price that cannot be absorbed by the supply chain. It is a price that exists because there are, in Asia and North America, a small number of buyers for whom owning a lot of the world’s most expensive coffee is itself the point. The coffee is the trophy. It is roasted in extremely small batches. It is served in small ceramic cups at tasting counters in Seoul and Tokyo. It is photographed for Instagram. Much of it is, very probably, not drunk with particular attention.
Not everyone in the industry is comfortable with this. The producers in Boquete who are not the Petersons — and there are several dozen of them now growing Geisha at scale — do not consistently receive auction premiums of this kind. The best of them receive two or three hundred dollars a pound, which is itself extraordinary; the rest receive between forty and eighty, which is still many multiples of what their grandfathers received for Typica. The tide has, genuinely, lifted the region. The boats are not, however, lifted evenly.
“Geisha made Boquete,” says Wilford Lamastus, who grows Geisha on a farm three valleys over from Esmeralda. “But Geisha also made Boquete into a casino. The very best table wins very big. The other tables lose more slowly than they used to, but they lose.”
A coffee, still
On the last morning of my visit, I drink a Geisha at the farm. Not from the auction lot — Rachel Peterson, smiling, points out that she cannot afford to drink that one herself — but from a parallel lot grown in the same block, processed the same way, released at a fraction of the price. It is served in a wide-mouthed porcelain cup, at seventy-four degrees Celsius, with no accompaniment.
The jasmine arrives first. Then a sweetness that is closer to white peach than to anything more familiar. Then a finish that seems to keep expanding in the back of the mouth long after the coffee itself is gone, like the memory of a scent from childhood that you cannot quite place.
It is an astonishing cup. It is also, inescapably, still a cup of coffee, grown on a hill, picked by a woman whose name I was given earlier in the day, processed by a crew of eleven people working in rotation through the harvest. The auction price does not change this. Neither does it, perhaps, entirely explain it.
I drink the cup. The cloud lifts off the slope. The morning, as it tends to in Boquete, begins again.