Gesha Village Estate

The story

Gesha Village Coffee Estate is a 471-hectare farm in the far southwestern highlands of Ethiopia, near the South Sudanese border, in the West Omo zone on the edge of the historic Bench Maji coffee area. Adam Overton and Rachel Samuel chose the site after months of searching for the elevation, rainfall and temperate climate that Gesha needs, and built the farm from untouched land beginning in 2011, in partnership with the California coffee educator Willem Boot. Its founding planting material was a seed selection harvested from wild Gesha populations in the nearby Gori Gesha forest — the wild coffee forest closest to where the Gesha lineage originated — and the estate now grows three Gesha-lineage selections side by side: Gesha 1931, Gori Gesha and Illubabor Forest. Today roughly 341 of the estate's 471 hectares are planted with about 730,000 coffee trees, while 27 percent of the property is preserved as forest and conservation area. Lots are sold under the names of its three sub-farms — Oma, Surma and Narsha — across eight farm blocks, at altitudes documented by roasters at roughly 1,900 to 2,100 m. Much of the farm's workforce comes from the local Meanit community, whom the estate describes as the longtime inhabitants and protectors of the Gesha forest area.

Challenges

Building a commercial coffee estate in one of Ethiopia's most remote regions meant creating a farm, its processing infrastructure and its trained workforce almost from nothing: the founders' own account describes months of land cultivation before Gesha Village became a working farm, in far-western highlands historically disconnected from the global specialty market.

Innovations

The estate's central innovation is varietal: returning Gesha to its homeland by cultivating wild-forest Gesha selections (Gesha 1931, Gori Gesha, Illubabor Forest) at commercial scale on one farm. It also brought the private-auction model to Ethiopian coffee through its annual Pride of Gesha international auction, whose first results were published in 2018, and it continues to release experimental processing series, most recently its Dark Room Dried (DRD) lots.