Artwork to come
The Japanese garden at the Huntington, before the crowds
Brief · A vintage mid-century travel postcard illustration. Style: printed like cheap vintage four-colour lithography, with a COARSE VISIBLE HALFTONE DOT SCREEN across the entire image — especially sky and water. Fine stipple and engraved tonal detail underneath the screen, but no bold black outlines, no woodcut, no comic ink, no photorealism, no 3D, no gloss, no digital gradients. Palette: warm cream-sand #f0d8c0 plus one blue — dusty teal #90c0c0 and slate #607878 when sun-bleached, saturated cyan #30c0d8 when vivid. Muted olive greens in foliage. Composition: the subject sits in the RIGHT THIRD; the left two-thirds is nearly empty sky, water or ground. Low horizon. No people, or figures so small they are marks. Scene: the Japanese garden at the Huntington in San Marino, early morning — the arched moon bridge over still water, koi pond, clipped pines, the moon bridge's reflection unbroken. Mood: rarefied, deliberate, expensive to maintain, faintly show-off. Optional single small red accent: one koi. No text, no lettering, no signage anywhere. 3:2 landscape, full bleed.
Gesha
Gesha, Ethiopia · collected 1936 · famous in Panama, 2004
also Geisha, which is a spelling mistake that stuck
“The Japanese garden at the Huntington. Everybody photographs it.”
Why this place
The Japanese garden at the Huntington is beautiful, deliberate, and expensive to keep. Every pine is clipped by somebody. The moon bridge exists to be photographed and is photographed roughly four thousand times a day, and none of that makes it less lovely — it is just impossible to encounter innocently.
Gesha is the same. Jasmine, bergamot, white peach, a body like tea and an aroma that reaches you before the cup does. It is genuinely one of the great flavours in agriculture, and it has been photographed so many times you cannot meet it without the price tag in the room.
Collected in the Gesha region of Ethiopia in 1936, ignored for decades, and then entered into Best of Panama in 2004 by Hacienda La Esmeralda, where it broke the auction record and the whole industry lost its mind.
- In the cup
- Jasmine, bergamot, white peach. Tea-like body, silky, and an aroma that arrives before the cup does
- Lineage
- An Ethiopian landrace selection, not a bred variety
- Grown
- Panama above all — Boquete, Volcán — plus Colombia and Ethiopia
- Altitude
- 1,600–2,200 m
- Brew it as
- Filter, light, and do not waste it on a bad grinder
Our opinion
Worth it once. Not worth it monthly. Anybody who tells you otherwise is selling Gesha.
Have it properly, once, brewed by somebody competent, so you know what the fuss is. It is a real flavour and not a con. But the marginal pleasure per dollar collapses fast, and the same money spent on four excellent Bourbons will give you a better month.
Do not buy cheap Gesha. A twenty-dollar Gesha is either not Gesha or is Gesha grown somewhere that has stripped it of everything that makes it Gesha — it is enormously sensitive to where it is planted. And do not waste it on a poor grinder; at that price, grind consistency is most of what you are paying for.
Sources
Out past the break
The Ethiopian Set
More from The Ethiopian Set