What i learned

only drinking washed peru gesha for a Quarter year

Do you think it would be cool

if you could have the most expressive coffees for a year, showing you all the potential that is out there? All the expertise and technique in farm work and processing catering to refined palates to create little bubbles of Wow and Zing and Kaboom in this grey dull world? Do you like Instagram reels showing an intense filter on footage of a US suburb saying “actually, the world used to be more colorful! This is how kids see the world.”?

All that color can be tiring as fuck. It’s just like some people need to decorate 95% of their interiors in that same shade of purple or orange and you’re thinking to yourself: “that looks like such a fun way of living!” But have you ever actually considered doing that with your apartment? Well the mouth is kind of the apartment of our minds. They’re just as effectively influenced by our gut microbiome or our heartrate but really our mouth is where we are incredibly particular about the way things feel that we put into it.

A lot of people are experts in professionally designing experiences catering to the likes and dislikes, moods and preferences of their mouths. And around October last year I felt like pouring all those extraordinary brews over my tongue was starting to become a bit too much. I didn’t wanna come home to an outlandish new sculptural sofa design replacing my comfy couch every day, if you know what I mean. I wanted to have a home again, not just an apartment.

And while I don’t get really annoyed by abstaining from things in preparation for Cup Tasters’ – which is probably just my Catholicism thriving on self restricting behavior – overcrowding my single’s-studio-palate with pompous expressions of feelings I never had made me a little uncomfortable.

(unjustified generalization ahead)

Do you know what’s so nice about washed Geshas from Peru? It’s not the bam boom kapow that the current ceilings of specialty coffee palaces are painted with. The first time I stretched for a ceiling in coffee they were painted in pastel clouds and clean dawn skies. Coincidentally, my employer Kaffeefabrik has been seeing a lot of those.

Washed Peru Geshas are floral not in the way of a Lush store but in the way the wind around Pentecost is carrying over fruit tree blossoms’ scents from a nearby garden. They are nutty not in the way the triple crunch double choc SoCal pie shop’s bestseller is but in the way of a freshly toasted hazelnut from Piemonte. Sometimes, when the heavier note is instead a creamier American pecan it has allllll the body you need and you don’t need a lot with filter. You just need it to be good.

I remember my first Gesha, back in the day still a rarity in the specialty coffee periphery that Austria has been for the longest time. I believe it was from Marcala, Honduras and it was terribly expensive for the time. It was like hazelnut ice cream and raspberry jam. It was like a pink cloud. It was like a pillow of sweetness, the kind of calm joy that is only experienced at the end of sorrow.

The shackles of labor

– assessing and putting into words delicious new Kaffeefabrik roasts – made me confront this distant past. In a time before local consumers knew about Sidras and Sudan Rumes the dessert like sweetness of this ultra-soft Honduras Gesha hit me like a truck. These days, its still softer cousins from Peru comfort me.

There is a time for everything and so there is also a time for fizzy champagne acidity and left hook-right hook strawberry jam-and-pineapple combos. Do you know the time for a clean, soft, floral everyday washed? Everyday.

Understand the sensation I am talking about: listen here!

There’s a certain esthetic to the way you live. You are writing about using the good washed Peru Gesha every day.

Well, every day is all there is. (rip Joan Didion)