Geisha coffee, a market with its own rules

Peru ships two coffee markets and counts them as one. The big one is a quarter of a million tonnes of ordinary coffee. The small one is forty five tonnes of geisha coffee, and it runs on its own buyers, its own months, its own sellers and a price that starts where the big one ends.

A small trade hidden inside a large one is a shape I keep meeting in Peru, in fine flavour cacao and in coloured quinoa too, so I have started calling it the Market Inside the Market. Five things give it away every time: a floor, a range, a map, a calendar and a supplier list. Geisha coffee has all five.

The floor first, because it is the most solid thing I found all week. Ninety seven batches of geisha coffee left Peru last year and not one sold below the ordinary coffee moving at the same time. Keep only batches over a hundred kilos and it holds. Keep only batches over five hundred, where a mislabeled sample cannot distort anything, and it holds again. All twenty five exporters who shipped geisha coffee cleared that line, the cheapest of them by a hair.

That floor survives the test that broke my last piece of work. With organic coffee the seal looked like it earned a premium until I compared organic and plain batches inside the same exporter, and the gap collapsed. Twenty two exporters shipped geisha coffee alongside their ordinary coffee last season, and in nineteen the geisha coffee sold above their own price, one at 4.4 times, two near 3.9, several around two. Three came out flat. The variety name does what the seal could not.

The range is where it stops behaving like a price at all. The cheapest tenth of the geisha batches sells near $10, the dearest tenth past $36, and across the twenty five exporters the spread runs $7.70 to $44.77. Nearly six to one inside a single variety name, which is a wider distance than the one between geisha coffee and ordinary coffee. The name buys the floor. Where it grew, how it was processed, how it tastes and when it was picked decide everything above it.

The map turned over when I looked at it. Asia takes about 70% of Peru’s geisha coffee by weight and 3% of its ordinary coffee, Taiwan alone on a third and China another quarter, with twelve separate exporters feeding that side. The obvious alternative, that quality simply flows east, does not hold: the other high quality coffee that carries no variety name goes west with the ordinary, four fifths of it, to France, Germany, Spain and Norway. The pull attaches to the name itself.

One caution before anyone prices off that map. Asian buyers pay more per kilo at market level, and inside single exporters selling to both sides the gap disappears. What moves is which batches go where, so I report the volume and leave the price claim alone.

The calendar is displaced by a full quarter. Ordinary coffee ships August to October, close to half the year’s volume in that window. Geisha coffee ships November to February, three fifths to four fifths of it, every year I can see. The small batches need picking over, tasting and sorting after the harvest, so this trade opens as the main season closes.

And the supplier list barely holds still. Twenty five exporters last year, seventeen of whom shipped no geisha coffee the year before, three present all three years, and a typical batch of 270 kilos.

Floor, range, map, calendar, supplier list. Every one of those five belongs to geisha coffee alone, and every one of them disappears the moment you look at Peruvian coffee as a single number. Forty five tonnes against a quarter of a million is small enough to round away, and rounding it away is most of why this trade is still open to anyone who separates it out and works it properly.

For a roaster the consequence lands in one place. The variety name on a Peruvian offer sheet promises you a floor above seven dollars and nothing else. The rest gets decided one batch at a time, in a window that opens in November, off a supplier list that will be one third familiar and two thirds new. So the sourcing question stops being what geisha coffee costs and becomes which batch, from whom, and whether anyone will tell you where it sits.

Does your supplier tell you where your coffee sits in that range? Send me a message if you want to know who actually grows and ships Peru’s geisha coffee.