Ask where a coffee is "from" and you'll usually get a country: Ethiopia, Colombia, Panama. But a coffee has two origins, not one — the country it was grown in, and the country its variety was bred or discovered in. Most of the time those two answers are the same. Sometimes they aren't, and the gap between them is its own story.
Coffee varieties travel the way most agricultural genetics travel: through research institutes running breeding programmes, through seed carried home by a producer who tasted something remarkable somewhere else, and through competition wins that make everyone want to grow the thing that just won. Two varieties show this especially well — one bred deliberately in a lab, one discovered wild in a forest — and both now show up in countries that had nothing to do with where they started.
Pacamara: Bred in El Salvador, Replanted in Colombia
Pacamara isn't a heritage variety that wandered into existence — it was built. In 1958, El Salvador's coffee research institute, the Instituto Salvadoreño de Investigaciones del Café (ISIC), crossed two parent varieties: Pacas, a naturally occurring Bourbon mutation first found in El Salvador in 1949, and Maragogype, a large-beaned Typica mutation discovered in Brazil back in 1870. The result combined both parents' names and both their traits — an unusually large bean with real cup complexity, though famously unstable from one generation to the next, which is part of why good Pacamara is still hard to grow well.
El Salvador — Tim Wendelboe, Los Pirineos. This is the variety on its home ground, and at one of the farms most responsible for keeping it there. Los Pirineos sits on the Tecapa volcano in Chinameca, Usulután, more than 150 hectares under native shade at 1,100 to 1,400 metres. Gilberto Baraona grew over eighty different cultivars on the farm and placed in the top ten of the El Salvador Cup of Excellence more than once; his son Diego runs it now, and produces certified Pacamara seed that he sells on to other farmers — which is, quite literally, how a variety leaves home. The lot is washed, and the cup is tart red berries, stone fruit and dark chocolate. Shop the Tim Wendelboe Los Pirineos Pacamara →
Colombia — Finca Zarza. Roughly 3,000km away, in Huila, brothers Jhonatan and Johan Gasca grow the same variety at Finca Zarza — a farm that has become one of the more talked-about names in competition-grade Colombian coffee. Grown between 1,550 and 1,800 metres and put through what the farm calls an "advanced washed" process, their Pacamara pushes past a standard wash for more aromatic intensity while keeping a clean structure. The cup is a world away from the Salvadoran version: raspberry, hibiscus and rose tea, floral and red-fruited rather than stone-fruited and creamy. Same variety, different farm, different hemisphere, different coffee entirely.
Geisha: Out of Ethiopia, By Way of Panama
Geisha's journey is longer and messier. The variety originates from the forests of southwestern Ethiopia — historians still debate the exact route it took from there, but the broadly agreed-upon path runs through mid-20th-century seed collections, a stop at research stations including CATIE (Centro Agronómico Tropical de Investigación y Enseñanza) in Costa Rica, and eventual planting in Panama's Boquete region in the 1960s. For decades it was a minor, low-yield variety that Panamanian farmers weren't especially attached to.
That changed in 2004, when the Peterson family entered a Geisha from Hacienda La Esmeralda's Jaramillo estate into the Best of Panama competition. It won, and sold at auction for $21 a pound — roughly ten times the going rate for excellent coffee at the time. Twenty years on, Esmeralda Geisha still sets world auction records; a 2025 lot sold for $30,204 per kilogram. Lots from the estate reach the UK in 100g bags, when they reach it at all.
Panama's win is also, directly, why Geisha exists in Colombia. Café Granja La Esperanza is a family operation run by the Herreras, now three generations in, and one of the most closely watched names in Colombian Geisha. Rigoberto Herrera brought Geisha seed back from a project in Panama in the mid-2000s, after a Best of Panama win — not to copy the Panamanian style, but to see how the variety would perform on Colombian soil in its own right. Their Las Margaritas farm in Caicedonia, Valle del Cauca, is the most Geisha-dedicated of their five farms. The same operation is behind the Potosi Sidra Natural we stock, roasted by TANAT — a different rare variety, handled with the same intent.
Colombia's Geisha has since developed well past a straight replant. At Finca El Arrayán in La Plata, Huila, Yilver Pajoy grows it at 1,860 metres and processes it washed: 36 hours in cherry, de-pulped, a further 36 hours of secondary fermentation, then 18 days on raised beds in a parabolic dryer. His lot placed fifth in the Western division of Osito's Copa de Oro. Yellow plum, fig and Earl Grey — restrained and tea-like where Panamanian Geisha tends to be perfumed. Shop the Manhattan Yilver Pajoy Gesha →
Peru is the newer frontier, and gets far less attention than either Panama or Colombia for it — undeservedly, on the evidence of what's in our range. At Finca La Palma in Cajamarca, Segundo Pintado Laban grows Geisha at 1,890m and processes it simply, as a straight washed coffee, letting the variety and the altitude do the work rather than an elaborate fermentation. The cup leans floral and herbal rather than fruit-forward: peach and cranberry, vanilla, white flowers, camomile and fig leaf — genuinely tisane-like, and distinct from the punchier Geishas coming out of Colombia. Shop the People Possession Finca La Palma Geisha →
Which countries are represented at any given moment changes with what we can get hold of — the Geishas currently in stock are here.
Why It's Worth Knowing
None of this makes one country's version of a variety "more authentic" than another's — Pacamara belongs to El Salvador the way Geisha belongs to Ethiopia, but neither has stayed put, and the coffee is better for it. Zarza's Pacamara wouldn't taste like Los Pirineos' if you grew it in the exact same spot; the differences come from soil, altitude, processing and the choices of the people growing it, layered on top of genetics that started somewhere else entirely. That's reason enough to try a variety from more than one country if you get the chance, not to rank the origins against each other but to taste the difference terroir actually makes.