My first encounter of the geisha coffee on the Big Island of Hawaii left me a long lasting impression. The Kona geisha coffee beans has won that Heavenly Coffee Farm numerous awards year after year ever since the founder started growing them from 1994.
I never call myself a coffee geek type but that geisha beans have a very unique fruity berry acid flavor that makes the beans standout from the rest of the coffee beans. It is so light and fruity that the drink is almost non coffee but a very unique herbal drink. In other words, geisha coffee is something I would have been able to instantly tell amongst a dozen of other similar grade artisan coffee made of other prestigious beans, if I had been asked to do a blind taste test of them all. For the rest I would have had to drill my imagination very hard to be able to tell a difference of their characters.
A few weeks ago I went to the 2024 San Francisco Coffee Festival. There were at least couple of dozens of coffee vendors show case their various products and lots of sample tasting. Naturally what caught my attend the most were the three vendors who offered gesha coffee. The first one was gesha beans grew in Columbia. I eagerly tasted it but the hint of the unique aroma was so vague that it was almost non exists. The second was specialized on the same beans from Ethiopia but almost equally lackluster. Then there was a stall with lots of coffee baby trees caught my attention. It claimed a California coffee grower and even more exciting was that they even grew gesha beans! I immediately asked for a sample tasting of it. To my surprise, the taste was immediately standout and uniquely distinguished aromatic. I was so moved by the fact this was something grew in our own beautiful can-do-everything California that my eyes were welling up.
I chatted with the man who poured me the sample California gesha coffee a bit. He was actually one of the co-founders of a brand that brave itself as the frontier and pilot of California grown coffee. Everything went back in 1998 when a few friends and field experts in California small agriculture program as well as exotic fruits spotted a pet coffee tree grew at Santa Barbra. That led to eventually this co-founder owns more that 60k+ baby California coffee trees and online order ready of the various coffee beans.
Judging by the good taste of these California gesha beans, I was very intrigued and immediately shared the discovery to my rich friend James who lost the bid of the Kona gesha coffee farm two years ago while we were vacationing in the Big Island of Hawaii.
“Please help me to arrange a tour of some of these SoCal coffee farms. This is even better than owning a boutique coffee farm from Hawaii since they are now just less than two hours drive from my home!” James got even more exited than me after heard this unbelievable great news.
So I started to leave emails to the contact email posted on the company’s website. According to their description, this company outsources the corp grow to about two dozens of farms between Santa Barbara and San Diego. Majority of the farms are the traditional lemon and avocado growers who are looking for scalping up and diversification of their corps.
Few weeks passed but there was no responses. I started to call their sales 1800 and left messages expressing the same interests of opportunities of the coffee farm tours.
Strangely enough, no one responded neither.
Our plan to meet James’s family in the coming weekend at Irvine still is unchanged and charged on.
Considering I just talked to the co-founder surrounded by a half dozen of his co-workers less than a month ago and people were lining up in that festival to buy their beautiful lush leafy baby California coffee trees, the ghosting reality of their absolutely no responses got stranger every day.
I crawled on their website for one more time and decided to give a call to the five-star hotel where the company boasts to be the host of pop up coffee store of their demo beans.
“Oh, we no longer carry their coffee as they just declare chapter 11 protection.”
I don’t blame them. Growing such tropical trees in California is not an easy task.
I actually bought one of their baby coffee trees from their stall the day when I attended the festival. They were so beautiful with lush shining green leaves. I put it in an oversized big clay pot and put it at our front porch which offers some micro warmer temperatures that I hope would help.
Still, the baby tree obviously went through a big shock but very brave to try hard to survive the new environment. For the first ten days or so, the lush leaves stayed still as if a frightened toddler tensed her muscles and with eyes closed hoping to get used to the new cold weather outside of its warm damp nursery where she came from.
From the third week, I made the decision to trim down one forth of her branches and cut off another one fourth of the matured leaves into half. Still she was slowly subtly wilting.
I moved her into our well-lit living room, next to my piano.
I started to touch her top leaves everyday, checking her up and murmured to her, wishing her well. I even played a few tunes hoping to cheer her up.
Today, I finally saw there was a second baby top leaf sticking out! But the overall dark green shining lush glow are almost gone in that forty days of survival. I hope one day I could bring it back.
We still eventually drove down to LA to meet James and his family as we’ve long planned. We even called up a few farms that were listed on the California coffee tree grower founder’s web site and seems nobody could response to our inquiry about their coffee trees.
There went our hope of enjoy California grown coffees. I admire the founders decade long determination and diligence to cultivate the special type of coffee trees that had the most hope to produce California coffee corps.
Kudos! You were so so close!
#frinj #californiacoffeecorps
