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2007 Prize-Winning Coffees
Posted by admin on 29 Oct 2007 | Tagged as: All aboute coffee, Reviews
Both the Esmeralda Especial and the El Salvador La Montana are unusual coffees, and both owe much of their distinctiveness and value to the botanical variety of the trees that produced them (or at least to the felicitous harmony of those trees and the terroir on which they are grown). The Esmeralda is produced from trees of the rediscovered Gesha variety, a cultivar of arabica that originated in Ethiopia, the botanical home of coffee, and traveled a complicated route from there, most likely Kenya to Tanzania to Costa Rica, before it reached its now hallowed hillside in Panama. At this point we do not know for certain how this variety fares when grown elsewhere in the world, but we doubtless will find out soon enough, given the number of farmers who are attempting to plant it.