From source to sip
The story behind your next cup.
On the western foothills of Chirripó, Costa Rica's highest peak, the Homberger family has farmed coffee for three generations. A small corner of their land at Finca Bernina is given over to Gesha, the cultivar that rewrote what people expect a cup of coffee to taste like.
Finca Bernina spreads across 460 hectares in the Perez Zeledon district, where Costa Rica's tallest mountain shapes the weather and the light. The Homberger family treats the land as more than a coffee farm. Only 80 hectares are planted with shade-grown coffee, while the rest holds cattle, sugar cane, and a sizable stretch of protected forest. That balance keeps the soil alive and the microclimate steady, two things a sensitive cultivar like Gesha cannot do without.
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The Coffee Story
The SourceA Family Farm in the Shadow of Chirripo
Finca Bernina spreads across 460 hectares in the Perez Zeledon district, where Costa Rica's tallest mountain shapes the weather and the light. The Homberger family treats the land as more than a coffee farm. Only 80 hectares are planted with shade-grown coffee, while the rest holds cattle, sugar cane, and a sizable stretch of protected forest. That balance keeps the soil alive and the microclimate steady, two things a sensitive cultivar like Gesha cannot do without.
The farm sits near 1,900 meters, the kind of high-altitude ground that slows cherry maturation and concentrates sugars in the bean. Costa Rica earns its reputation as one of Central America's most exacting coffee origins, and the Chirripo highlands rank among its most promising for delicate, aromatic varieties. Gesha traces back to the forests around the town of Gesha in southwestern Ethiopia, and it carries that wild floral lineage wherever it is replanted.
The CraftRed Honey, Then Solar Roasting
This lot is processed using the red honey method, one of the more demanding points on the processing spectrum. After picking, the skin is removed but more than half of the sticky mucilage is left clinging to the parchment as the coffee dries. Those sugars feed back into the bean over days of careful drying, building body and a deeper, fruit-forward sweetness than a fully washed coffee would carry. It uses far less water than washed processing, which fits the way this farm thinks about its watershed.
We roast this Gesha to City+, a measured medium-light level that protects the cultivar's signature aromatics instead of flattening them. Pushing it darker would trade the jasmine and citrus for roast character, and that would defeat the point. Roasting happens in small batches at our Virginia Beach roastery, powered by solar energy.
The CupFloral, Bright, and Layered
The first thing you notice is the aroma, jasmine and honeysuckle lifting off the cup before you taste anything. The sip follows with bright grapefruit acidity and a tea-like clarity that Gesha is famous for. As it cools, lychee and soft berry sweetness fill in, a payoff from the red honey sugars that the medium body carries gracefully.
This is a coffee built for slow drinking and close attention. It rewards anyone curious about why Gesha became one of the most talked-about cultivars in specialty coffee.
