CGLE Las Margaritas Dorado Geisha

Tropical fruit, grapefruit, raspberry, concord grape, and a black tea finish. This is a natural Geisha from one of Colombia's most respected producer families, and it drinks like it.

Café Granja La Esperanza has been in the Herrera family since 1945, when Blanca Ligia Correa and Juan Antonio Herrera planted their first coffee trees on Finca Potosí in Valle del Cauca. Three generations later, the operation is run by brothers Rigoberto and Luis Eduardo Herrera across five farms in the Andes, each developed around its own microclimate, varietals, and processing methods. For the past two decades, Rigoberto has built CGLE's identity around rare varietal cultivation: Geisha, Pink Bourbon, Sudan Rumé. He started planting these at a time when Valle del Cauca wasn't associated with high-value specialty coffee, and when the market hadn't yet learned to value what he was growing. The bet was that quality would eventually be recognised regardless of region. It was.

Las Margaritas is the farm in the CGLE system where their Geisha programme lives. It sits at 1,570 to 1,850 metres in the Caicedonia area, spread across 14 separate lots on about 34 hectares. The Dorado lot is their natural Geisha selection, processed as a full natural with whole cherry dried over an extended period, allowing the cherry's sugars and fermentation-derived aromatics to develop slowly. With Geisha, natural processing does something specific: the variety's inherent floral and tea-like character, which you can still feel in the black tea finish here, coexists with the fruit-forward depth that full-cherry drying brings. The concord grape and raspberry give it a winey sweetness, the tropical fruit adds richness, and the grapefruit keeps the acidity bright enough that the cup never feels heavy. It's a combination that has become one of the more sought-after expressions of the variety across origins, and CGLE was producing it in Valle del Cauca before most of the market was paying attention.

This is the kind of coffee that reminds you how much a producer's conviction shapes what ends up in the cup. Best as filter, and worth taking your time with.

Origin: Valle Del Cauca, Colombia
Producer: Herrera Family
Elevation: 1,570 - 1,850 masl
Varietal: Geisha
Process: Natural 
Roast Level: Light-Medium
Tasting Notes: Tropical Fruit · Grapefruit · Raspberry · Concord Grape · Black Tea