DAK - La Esmeralda | Panama - Washed - Geisha

The lands that make up Hacienda La Esmeralda were first brought together as a single estate by a Swede name Hans Elliot in 1940. This land comprised several hundred hectares in what are now the Palmira and Canas Verdes farms. In 1967, a Swedish-American banker by the name of Rudloph Peterson bought Hacienda La Esmeralda as a retirement venue. At the time, the land was predominantly pasture for cattle with some small smatterings of coffee. By 1975, the Petersons had swicthed the farms over to dairy cattle which perfomered quite well. In the mid 80s, the family was looking to further diversify and coffee was a perfect opportunity. Coffee had been growing on lands in and around La Esmeralda since at least 1890. At this time, it was almost exclusively a mass-market product. It was not until the mid 90s that some North American coffee buyers started talking about Specialty Coffee widely. In 1997, the family purchased the land that became the Jaramillo Farm. This plot on the side of Volcan Baru was selected for its high altitude, in hopes of developing higher scoring coffees. The farm had recently been devastated by coffee leaf rust, but Daniel Peterson noticed that the Geisha trees had not been hurt as badly, so they decided to plant Geisha on more part of the farm, above 1650 MASL. It was this high-altitude planting of Geisha that helped them win the 2004 Best of Panama competition.