Coffee Geishas Flourishing in Panama Highlands
By Mike Power BOQUETE, Panama (Reuters) - Panama's little-known geishas are slender, exotic and seductive, and they flourish in the cool mountain air of its western highlands.
Original article available at: http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=ourWorldNews&storyID=8565677 One expert was so taken with them that he says he levitated slightly after his encounter with the geishas.
But these are no kimono-clad hostesses. They are a type of coffee plant being raised here in the thousands as farmers cash in on a specialty coffee market that has flourished since a global coffee crisis hurt the quality of regular beans.
The Ruiz plantation, Panama's top specialty exporter, is raising 5,000 geisha seedlings and many more farms around the highlands town of Boquete are now planting the little-known cultivar with roots in Ethiopia, where coffee is said to have been discovered by a goat herder in the 9th century.
The geisha was bought to Panama in 1963 from Costa Rica. Its yields were at first considered too low to be profitable but that changed as consumer tastes became more sophisticated, creating a strong global market for expensive quality coffees.
The global specialty coffee movement picked up steam with a coffee crisis that ran from late 1999 to 2004 amid a glut in generic beans and saw coffee quality deteriorate as farmers were driven out of business or spent less on crop care.
A select few invested in lower-yield, higher-quality beans, among them the geisha variety.
"What the coffee crisis showed us is that we have to keep higher quality. What happened in the last couple of years is bound to happen again. We can't compete with commercial coffee prices. We have to separate ourselves," said local producer Daniel Price Peterson.
His own Hacienda Esmeralda Jaramillo geisha coffee set a world record price of $21 a pound at an Internet auction in 2004, when the commodity market price stood at $0.73 a pound.
At an international specialty coffee event in Seattle last month, the Hacienda Esmeralda Jaramillo took first place over traditional champions from Ethiopia and other African and Latin American nations.
Expert "cuppers," who score quality coffees, say geishas have something special separating them from the others.
"Today, on one of the cupping tables, I had one of those rare experiences where you float off the ground a little bit and lose yourself. As a cupper, you live for those moments," said Doug Welsh, vice president of the coffee division at the U.S. coffee roaster and retailer Peet's Coffee and Tea.
"It has a remarkable aromatic complex. It's floral, and explosive on the palate and has a jasmine-like fragrance," Walsh said at a recent event in Boquete.
After the price crash of 1999, specialty coffee "cuppings" or tastings followed by auctions were introduced in the Americas to differentiate specialty beans from generic ones selling at prices below production costs.
As more farmers cultivate geishas, Panama is becoming widely recognized as one of the world's finest coffee origins.
The move to lower-yield, higher-quality beans has also been seen in other Central American countries. In El Salvador, for example, farmers are experimenting with dozens of varieties of quality beans to see if they take to the local soil.
Neighboring countries also want their own geishas, but Panama's growers are reluctant to share them.
Francisco Serracin, whose geisha was ranked Panama's second-best coffee this year, says he gets e-mails and calls from growers begging for the beans in Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Guatemala.
"For the moment, it's not logical to sell it," he said. "It belongs to Panama, and we want to make sure that Panama remains the only producer of such an exotic coffee as this."
