Tag: geisha

mini review: Café Unido

You may have read in the news of President Joe Biden’s visit on Cinco de Mayo to Las Gemelas, a taqueria in Washington, DC’s La Cosecha market. It’s too bad he didn’t go to the other end of La Cosecha, where he would have found one of DC’s finest coffee purveyors.

La Cosecha is a beautiful, high-end marketplace in the Union Market district, featuring merchants selling food, wine, apparel and household goods, all to showcase the diaspora of Latin American cultures. There you’ll find Café Unido, a stand in the market selling Panamanian coffees, with airy indoor and outdoor seating areas.

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mysteries of the geisha

no, not that kind of geisha
photo: Electravk/Getty Images

Until recently I had never heard of Geisha coffee, the hyper-expensive specialty beans grown in Latin America, often at very high altitude. The name is not related to the traditional Japanese entertainers, but the Gesha region of Ethiopia, where the bean originated before being taken to Latin America. You can fall down the historical rabbit hole of the name derivation and the “is it geisha or gesha” coffee nerd battle here.

I was talking with a colleague who is from Bolivia and the conversation turned to coffee. She told me her family back home has a coffee plantation that produces this super premium coffee in very small lots, which they sell to a very limited clientele of roasters around the world. The company, Takesi, has the highest elevation plantation in the world. Takesi sells in the US to Intelligentsia, and the beans sell out in fast order when they are available. I’m hoping to get a chance at some point to try it.

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