Gaia Estate - Tanzania | Spring Water Washed, Gesha [Omni]

[Filter Light Roast]

Processing: Spring Water Washed
Varietal: Gesha
Region: Karatu District, Arusha Region, Tanzania
Farm: Neel & Kavita Vohora / Gaia Estate
Altitude: 1650-1800+Masl

Note: Orange, Jasmine, Oolong Tea

PROCESS DETAILS

Prefermentation of cherries, Depulped, Fermentation between 36 and 54 hour and washed in fresh spring water.

FARM'S DETAILS （Information from Souce）

Under the watchful guidance of sibling team Neel and Kavita Vohora, the Edelweiss and Gaia farms have begun to blossom from well-managed estate farms, spanning 1000 acres across multiple ridges of the Ngorongoro caldera in northern Tanzania, into an innovative and genre-defying coffee enterprise. I’ve worked with Neel and Kavita, and the coffees from the farms for 15 years and I can definitively say that their most recent harvest is the most exciting I’ve ever tasted.    

At the vanguard of the team’s efforts are their Gesha plantings, newly matured trees giving some of the first exportable harvests this year and stunning us with their deeply floral flavors and elegant nuance. The plants were grown from seed stock related to the New World’s initial Gesha trees, first noticed on the Peterson farm Hacienda la Esmeralda in Panama in the early aughts but brought to Costa Rica’s CIRAD facility as early as the 1960s from a research station in… wait for it… Tanzania. Neel’s befriended that research station’s current manager and has a vast trove of genetic information and historical records at his fingertips, and the data is fascinating. Needless to say, we’ll be keeping a close eye on some of the new seedlings I saw growing in the nursery at the farms on a recent visit.   

The Vohoras’ farms continue to innovate in processing methodology as well. Rather than resting on the laurels of tradition, nearly all of their coffee (including the commercial volumes of larger lots) goes through a cherry maceration period prior to processing. For microlots like this Gesha, the timeframe for whole cherry “pre-fermentation” is determined specifically by cultivar, through a trial-and-error process that’s been honed into precise protocols to bring out the best in each variety. In this case, the Gesha harvest will macerate in whole cherry on raised beds under protective tarps for four days prior to depulping and fermenting for 36-58 hours in a covered tank. After this, the coffee is washed, graded, and dried on raised beds for about two weeks. After this is finished, the dried coffee is stored in GrainPro until it can be milled in Vohora’s facility back in Arusha.  

Ngorongoro, the world’s largest unbroken caldera, looms over a verdant landscape, the shell of an ancient, ruptured volcano. Inside its walls, a wildlife conservation area cut off from much access to the outside world, is home to hordes of zebra, eland, gazelles, wildebeests, two prides of lions, hyenas, hippopotami, and scores of other local birds and mammals, including a small population of black rhino. The Maasai, among the region’s more visible residents with distinctive red flannel robes and unchanged traditions of nomadism, are frequent visitors, passing through the crater with their goat and cattle herds in tow. The caldera’s wildlife are no strangers to the farms, either. Native forest corridors on the estates allow freedom of movement for the animals as they migrate, but it’s fairly common to find damage to the coffee trees; the most frequent offenders being elephants and water buffalo.  

The Vohora’s estates are nestled into the caldera’s outer ridges, bordering the park. Since 1971, the Vohoras have owned about 1000 acres of farmland on the southern exterior slopes near the town of Karatu. The siblings’ grandfather arrived from India, first working for the British colonists as a farm manager prior to the nation’s independence, and their father founded and ran the export business from nearby Nairobi. 

Today, Neel manages the farms, including overseeing more than fifty full-time employees and nearly eight hundred seasonal workers during the peak of harvest. He’s also at the forefront of processing innovations and cultivar selections. Kavita helms the export business from Arusha, and is the lead cupper and licensed Q Grader at the dry mill. Her daughter, Nicolene, is learning to taste coffee… the family’s fourth generation, now in training.