Lelida Estate Gesha Coffee Beans

Panama is a Central American producer of specialty coffee. Though small in size, its high-quality coffee mainly comes from the area around the Barú Volcano, which is also the earliest region where coffee was planted in Panama. It is home to many world-renowned specialty coffee farms, such as the famous Hacienda La Esmeralda and Elida Estate, among others. Lelida Estate is also a traditional specialty coffee farm here, producing coffee of superior quality. Its Gesha coffee achieved notable results in the 2020 Best of Panama (BOP) green bean competition.

Lelida Estate (Finca Lerida), established in 1924, has not only cultivated delicious coffee beans over the years (the famous Gesha coffee originates here), but also, throughout its century-long coffee-growing history, developed numerous techniques that enhance coffee quality. The estate was founded by Mönniche, a Norwegian chief engineer who participated in the construction of the Panama Canal and later purchased land in the area to grow coffee. He noticed that harvested coffee cherries often varied greatly in quality, so he researched and invented the "Sifon" device for floating and layering beans—a pioneering technique at the time, which is what we now know as the washed processing method. Washed processing laid the technical foundation for the stable production of coffee beans in terms of scale and quality, and remains an important coffee processing method to this day, widely used by coffee-growing countries around the world.