Adam Overton & Rachel Samuel

History

Adam Overton and Rachel Samuel first came to Ethiopia in 2007 to make a documentary about the country's coffee. Samuel had been born in Ethiopia, and the filming project connected the couple deeply to the country's people and its coffee industry. Their new obsession led them to Willem Boot, the San Francisco Bay Area coffee educator known for his passion for Gesha, who taught them the fundamentals of growing and evaluating coffee with a quality focus. After months of searching Ethiopia for land with the elevation, rainfall and temperate climate Gesha demands, they chose a remote site near the Gori Gesha forest in the far southwest — a few kilometers from the South Sudanese border — and established Gesha Village Coffee Estate in 2011, cultivating a founding seed selection harvested from the wild Gesha plants of that forest. Over the following decade they turned untouched land into a 471-hectare estate with roughly 730,000 coffee trees, helping create a commercial Gesha industry in the very region where the variety was born, with much of the workforce drawn from the local Meanit community.