Panama Elida ASD Natural Direct Trade

Before we talk about the Elida estate and the Lamastus Family and their awards and world record price shattering feats, let us talk about the coffee and how we came to lay our hands on it.

This is Gesha coffee.... Geisha is to coffee plant varietals what the Beatles are to music. There was coffee before Geisha was introduced to the world in 2004 and coffee afterwards. And Panama (rightly or wrongly) is where all the world's attention is focussed when it comes to this mercurial plant.

This is Panama... Panama as a growing country is as unique as the geisha plant itself. To the north Costa Rica, to the south Colombia. Its comparable advantage over these other power house growing regions is in its thin, narrow landmass that allows it to get both the Carribean AND Pacific trade winds. This geographical positioning of Panama combined with rich volcanic soils and the cold currents that come down from the north and the hot ones that come from the south offer coffee producers in Chiriqui a unique competitive advantage.

And this is A.E.T.... This lot already has the Brilliance cards stacked in its favor. When the delicate winemaking technique known as Carbonic maceration is thrown into the processing of the geisha coffee cherry then we truly have something unique. The A stands for anaerobic fermentation. A curing stage that locks whole coffee cherries in a sealed tanks deprived of oxygen. The carbon dioxide emitted by the fruits in the tank can pass out but no oxygen can pass in. The cherries are left inside of these tanks for 6 days upon which they are removed and placed out to dry on raised beds in semi shade for up to 30 days. This is the Slow Dry component to the process.

Because the fruit is whole and its environment is without air circulation or oxygen, carbonic maceration is essentially a custom-curing of each coffee seed in an enclosed bath of fruit jam, without any of the dehydration that would normally slow osmosis between the fruit and the seed.

If Gesha coffees are known for florality and complexity then the anaerobic fermentation process that this Gesha coffee has gone through turns the varietal into a head spinning medley of tropical fruit and sweet booze heaven.

And this is Elida Estate The Elida Estate is owned and operated by the Lamastus family. It is the highest coffee farm in all of Panama and the family first planted Geisha coffee in 2006. The LaMastus Family along with the Peterson Family of Hacienda Esmeralda fame are now the two recognized family titans of Panamanian coffee.

The Rise of Geisha coffee When The Petersons first entered a Geisha coffee into the Best of Panama Cup in 2004 it sold for $21 a pound, the coffee world sat up, at the time to break $5 was unheard of.

This was just beginning however....

$50 per pound threshold was reached in 2006
$130 in 2007
$170 in 2010
In 2013 Hacienda Esmeralda introduced their first natural Geisha to the best of Panama cup and it sold for $350 pp.

And like Picasso and Braque who said that their intense friendship and rivalry spurred their creativity. The Hacienda Esmeralda and Elida estate have also been like two mountaineers, each one climbing a little further up the mountain and in turn throwing down a rope and pulling the other one up.

In the last two years it is the LaMastus Family and its Elida estate that have broken the record again and again, in 2018 $850 pp and then in 2019 an incredible $1029 per pound was reached.

This is modcups first ever offering from them. At 20g a cup there are 8 cups

Suggested Listening "An Ending Ascent" Brian Eno