Panama Geisha: The World's Most Expensive Coffee Premium Coffee Brands

An Aromatic Journey

Smell the beans directly and you notice a fruity candy aroma; brew them and a very fragrant jasmine scent appears; while the coffee is hot you can taste the sweet lychee and honey peach flavours most clearly.

Baristas describe it as "like perfume."

The World's Most Expensive Coffee

"601 Geisha Coffee" (Esmeralda Geisha 601) was the champion coffee at the 2017 Best of Panama competition and broke the world record to become the most expensive coffee in history. FrontStreet Coffee has only a few kilograms, which makes it extremely precious.

The King of Specialty Coffee

"Every mid-year, Panamanian estates submit their best coffee beans for competition. After dozens of judges and more than a week of cupping evaluations, the year's champion is chosen." And "601 Geisha Coffee" is precisely this year's champion. "601 refers to the online auction amount, and this year's auction broke the world record at $601 per pound."

Geisha coffee has long been regarded as the king of specialty coffee because it is difficult to cultivate and therefore scarce. "Geisha has demanding soil requirements and has to be planted at high altitudes, and the trees of this variety grow especially tall, which makes harvesting difficult. As a result, very few people are willing to grow it."

At $601 per pound, this coffee is nearly double the world record of $350 per pound set four years earlier. Besides being precious for its scarcity, its cupping score is remarkably high. "Generally a specialty coffee cups at 80 points or above, but '601 Geisha Coffee' broke the world record with 94.11 points."

Natural Processing Preserves Coffee's Sweetness

The processing methods for green coffee include washed, natural and honey. Washed coffee ferments in water, which makes the flavour cleaner. "The estate used the harder-to-control natural process for this batch of Geisha, hoping to preserve the sweetness inside," Herman noted.

"A coffee bean has fruit pulp around it, and the pulp holds sugar. Because the beans are not soaked in water, the sugar from the pulp penetrates into the bean during drying, and that creates the coffee's sweetness. So '601 Geisha Coffee' has lychee and honey peach flavours — which is also what makes natural-processed coffee special."

The Essence of Fine Coffee

The author believes a quality cup of specialty coffee can let anyone taste nature's sweetness. "Good coffee should be like fruit tea and flower tea, carrying the flavour of its region rather than the flavour of roasting. When beans are burnt, all you taste is the bitterness of burning, whereas the flavour of the seed should be what nature gives you."

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Geisha's price comes down to scarcity: low yields, weak disease resistance and demanding cultivation have kept it the most sought-after variety in coffee, and Esmeralda's own line makes the hierarchy clear. The Red Label — properly, Esmeralda Special — is grown at 1,600–1,800 metres, and every batch must cup above 90 points, holds its own lot number and comes from a single plot; the Green Label, or Private Collection, blends several plots to express the estate's high-altitude signature and costs far less, which is why it is such good value. For newcomers, FrontStreet tends to recommend its entry-level Boquete Geisha from Panama, where the classic orange-blossom honey, oolong-tea finish and fine fruit acidity come through in clear layers at a reasonable price.

Ethiopia offers the other great Geisha tradition. Gesha Village grows only Geisha varieties — Gori Gesha, Gesha 1931 and Illubabor Forest — and grades them as Gold (RARITIES), Red (GROWERS RESERVE), Green (SINGLE-TERROIR) and Chaka, with the Gold Label being Gesha 1931 at about 10% of output and the finest coffee outside the auction, and the Red Label being Gori Gesha at roughly 15% of production and 88 points or above on the SCA scale. FrontStreet's Genlana Geisha, from a station founded in 2014 at the Kochere–Genlana Abaya border and run by Israel Degefa, is dried on raised beds for 14–20 days after hand-picking, and roasted medium-light it shows bright citrus, an elegant ginger-flower note and ripe-fruit sweetness with a delicate finish. Geisha also makes an excellent cold brew: FrontStreet suggests 30g of beans ground to fine-sugar size (EK43s setting 9, C40 setting 24), 360g of room-temperature water at 1:12, eight hours in the fridge, then filtering and a further three hours of chilling, for a cup of grape juice, rose, sweet orange and fruit wine.