The Gesha Village journey began back in 2007 when Adam Overton and Rachel Samuel were making a documentary about coffee for the Ethiopian government. It was during this project that they were first introduced to Dr. Girma, their guide through the Gera Coffee Forest near Jimma. Dr. Girma is a coffee researcher and a wealth of information about coffee agronomy, and farm management. During the process of creating this documentary, Rachel was reintroduced to her birth country and Adam became fascinated by the rich coffee history of the birthplace of coffee.

By the end of this coffee expedition, the couple felt compelled to start their own coffee farm. They saw too much unexplored potential and opportunity in Ethiopia’s wild coffee forests to ignore. Even though the country’s coffee trade was established long ago, Ethiopia’s coffee sector as a whole was and indeed still is far behind newer coffee origins in terms of agricultural and processing innovations, as well as market access, which - in the current state of the coffee industry - are some of the most important distinctions between specialty and commercial coffee. Adam and Rachel sought to utilize this gap in the Ethiopian specialty market to establish Gesha Village Estate.

While Passenger’s green buying team has not been able to visit Adam and Rachel in Ethiopia since 2020, we have maintained contact with their team, and continued to purchase coffees from the farm each year. Passenger’s two 2024 Gesha Village harvest selections, that we are sharing just in time for the holidays, represent the tenth consecutive year that coffees from this remarkable estate have graced the Reserve Lot menu.

Three varieties are cultivated at Gesha Village: two heirloom Gesha varieties and one disease-resistant variety acquired from the Jimma Agricultural Research Center (JARC). The two heirloom varieties were selected from the nearby (20km away) Gori Gesha forest, which through genetic testing has been determined to be the collection site for the famous 1931 expedition that resulted in the now much celebrated Panamanian gesha variety. Both of Passenger’s 2024 Gesha Village lots are dry-processed examples of the heirloom variety that Rachel and Adam refer to as “Gesha 1931”. This particular lot comes from the Surma ‘block’, which represents one of 8 ‘blocks’ that the farm at Gesha Village Estate is divided into. While both of our Gesha Village selections this year are dry processed, our buying team was impressed with the exceptional and unique character of each of the two lots, and we’re thrilled to present each lot as a way to taste and enjoy the wide breadth of complexity that Gesha Village Estate can offer.