Introduction to Gesha Village Coffee & Pour-over Ratios Sharing

FrontStreet Coffee - Ethiopia Gesha Village & Pour-over Ratio Introduction

The Origin of Gesha Village Estate

In 2007, documentary director Adam Overton and his photographer wife Rachel Samuel, while filming a documentary about Ethiopian coffee for the government, came across the Gera coffee forest in the Bench Maji region - and conceived the idea of founding their own coffee estate and brand.

In 2009 they had the good fortune to meet Willem Boot, the renowned owner of La Mula estate and a Best of Panama judge. Boot's vision gave the couple their opening: return to Ethiopia to find the birthplace of Gesha.

They eventually arrived in Bench Maji, a region in southwestern Ethiopia near South Sudan, where many places bear the name Gesha and where the original Gesha was most likely to be found.

Following Willem Boot, Adam began "exploring" the forests around the area. In jungle thick with ancient trees they found multiple wild coffee species and, to their greatest surprise, wild Gesha.

They later learned this was the Gori Gesha forest - the very place where the Gesha variety was first discovered. So they collected seeds from the native Gesha trees, screened them, and planted them back on their own land. The estate they founded there was named Gesha Village Coffee Estate: a coffee farm of 475 hectares located about 12 miles from the Gori Gesha forest.

Unlike most Ethiopian farms, Gesha Village is no smallholder plot but a large estate with its own washing station and laboratory - and it grows nothing but Gesha varieties, rather than the typical Ethiopian mix of native cultivars that cannot be pinned down.

Gesha Village Coffee Varieties

Gesha Village grows three varieties, each named after the expedition or source that brought it to the estate: Gesha 1931, Gori Gesha, and Illubabor, provided by the Ethiopian Coffee Research Center.

Gesha 1931 was confirmed through plant morphology, bean shape and size, and cupping; it is the closest to the parent variety of Panama Gesha. The Gori Gesha heirloom was collected by the estate's owners on their own 2011 expedition into the Gori Gesha wild coffee forest, about 20 kilometers from the farm, and no duplicate samples have been found anywhere else.

From the very beginning, the owners collected wild Gesha seeds from the Gori Gesha forest to plant and cultivate. After seven years of continuous effort - extending and developing remote wilderness woodland - the 475-hectare Gesha Village coffee farm was born in that forest.

In fact, that scale is precisely what sets the estate apart in Ethiopia: a single large farm, devoted entirely to Gesha, with standardized quality control that most smallholder-based Ethiopian coffee simply cannot match.

Pour-over

V60 dripper, water temperature 90°C, grind size BG-5R (60% pass-through on a #20 sieve), powder-to-water ratio 1:15, brewed in segments. The flavor profile is as follows:

[Gold Label] Smells of fermented wine aroma, with soft citrus and strawberry acidity on entry, nut and cream-like sweetness in the middle, and a sugarcane aftertaste; as the cup cools, strawberry jam and lemon fragrance emerge.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Gesha Village's own grading mirrors Panama's rigor. The Gold Label is a Gesha 1931 lot making up just 10% of the estate's output - its top coffee outside auction, frequently chosen by competition baristas - and FrontStreet's Gold Label batch is an exquisite natural, complex and layered from dry fragrance to lingering finish. The Red Label GROWERS RESERVE, a Gori Gesha accounting for 15% of production, scores 88 or above on the SCA 100-point scale; as a single-terroir series, every batch number carries full traceability - farm block, variety, and processing date. A Green Label SINGLE-TERROIR line and the Chaka lot round out the range.

If you would like an easier starting point, FrontStreet's Genlana Estate Gesha from the Yirgacheffe area is the recommended entry-level Ethiopian gesha. Its processing station, founded in 2014 and run by Israel Degefa, sits amid 700 hectares of largely uncultivated, shade-covered land; hand-picked ripe cherries are dried on raised beds for 14-20 days depending on the weather. A medium-light roast brings bright citrus acidity, elegant ginger-flower aromatics, and the full sweetness of mature fruit with gesha's signature refined finish.

To brew any of them, FrontStreet suggests: grind to about fine sugar (78% passing a #20 sieve), water at 91 degrees C, 15 g of coffee on a small Hario V60 at 1:16. Bloom with 30 g of water for 30 seconds, pour in small circles to 125 g, wait for the bed to drain halfway, then pour to 225 g; total extraction should land around 2:10-2:20.