The Gesha Village journey began back in 2007 when Adam Overton and Rachel Samuel were making a documentary about coffee for the Ethiopian government. It was during this project that they were first introduced to Dr. Girma, their guide through the Gera Coffee Forest near Jimma. Dr. Girma is a coffee researcher and is a wealth of information about coffee agronomy, and farm management. During the process of creating this documentary, Rachel was reintroduced to her birth country and Adam became fascinated by the rich coffee history of the birthplace of coffee.
By the end of this coffee expedition, the couple felt compelled to start their own coffee farm. They saw too much unexplored potential and opportunity in Ethiopia’s wild coffee forests to ignore. Even though the country’s coffee trade was established long ago, Ethiopia’s coffee sector as a whole was and indeed still is far behind newer coffee origins in terms of agricultural and processing innovations, as well as market access, which - in the current state of the coffee industry - are some of the most important distinctions between specialty and commercial coffee. Adam and Rachel sought to utilize this gap in the Ethiopian specialty market to establish Gesha Village Estate.
