Why Panama Geisha Is the World’s Most Coveted Coffee

Best of Panama

Third-generation coffee producer Ricardo Koyner, owner of Kotowa Coffee Estates and president of the Specialty Coffee Association of Panama (SCAP), has watched Panama’s coffee industry transform. SCAP began in 1996 as an alliance of seven producers from Boquete and Volcán determined to distinguish Panama’s coffee at a time when buyers were scarce.

“There might have been five buyers, and everyone was hiding their contacts,” Koyner recalls. Producers began attending international coffee events to connect with buyers and draw attention to the region. Best of Panama followed, pairing competition with an online auction that opened the country’s top lots to buyers around the world.

The watershed moment came in 2004, when Hacienda La Esmeralda entered its high-altitude Geisha. At auction, the winning lot sold for $21 per pound, breaking the $20 barrier for Panamanian coffee. “We thought there was a hacker,” Koyner laughs.

“Cupping is a standard where we taste coffee over 30 minutes in a very rudimentary brew,” says Pigot. The process standardizes how coffees are evaluated, from smelling the dry grounds and breaking the crust after brewing to tasting the coffee repeatedly as it cools. “A great coffee keeps getting better as it cools: it tastes like chocolate, as it cools there are mid-tones like honey or stone fruits and body, and then as it cools further, sweetness and acidity. A coffee that's scoring in the 90s has upwards of 10 to a dozen descriptors like jasmine, plum, florals. You just keep writing. That's the sign of a truly exceptional cup.”

For Chanis, the scores help explain Panama’s dominance at the top of the market. “Everybody is planting Geisha, but nobody's getting the points we are. It's not subjective – points are points.”

Panama produces coffee on a relatively small scale, making its top lots inherently scarce. “Best of Panama is artisanal. I have been a lover of the Best of Panama coffee beans since 2018 when I tried for the first time from the Lamastus Family Estates. And then from then onwards, the Best of Panama has become a kind of tuna auction.”

"It's a coffee producer thing specific to Chiriquí that I don't see anywhere else in the world," says Chanis. "Panama is so small – you can track all the main producers really close family friendships to the beginning: Ricardo, Wilford [Lamastus]… their parents were best friends as well." He continues: "Other specialty industries need to learn from the business and the human model that they have, because they're friends and families before they are business partners ([since] most of them have the same buyers)."

Koyner sees labor shortages and climate change as the industry’s biggest challenges in the coming decade. Fewer young people are willing to take on the demanding work of harvesting coffee on Chiriquí’s steep terrain, while excessive rain, drought, and rising temperatures threaten production.

“There’s going to be less product than people asking for it,” he says. “The [producers] that survive will be the ones able to pay very high salaries for people to work at the farm level.”

Higher prices can also benefit farm workers. Hacienda La Esmeralda says its Geisha sales allow it to pay harvesters three times the going rate, while also providing housing, meals, childcare, medical assistance, and end-of-harvest payments. Kotowa likewise provides medical care and programs for workers’ children.

And the rising prices extend well beyond the record-setting lots. “Seventy or eighty percent of all the samples went above $100 a kilo,” Chanis says of the 2025 auction. “That’s crazy. And that’s going to continue growing.” At the 2026 auction in September, all 40 Geisha lots sold for more than $1,500 per kilogram, with the top lot fetching $18,004 per kilogram.

Geisha Stateside

Pigot credits influential U.S. specialty roasters with helping introduce Geisha to American drinkers. “The auction was a marketing opportunity… not just ‘we want to taste this delicious coffee,’ but ‘how can we sell it and make noise about it.’”

Today, Panama Geisha is easier to find in the United States, though the most coveted lots remain scarce. At Vespertine and Meteora, Kahn works with Verve Coffee to source Geishas from Graciano Cruz’s Los Lajones and Emporio Estate in Panama, with natural and washed lots roasted for his restaurants. He serves them as hand brews, describing Panama Geisha as “poetic in taste,” best expressed “in their purest form… using Oregon spring water.”

Specialty coffee drinkers can also seek out Panama Geisha at roasters and cafés including Café Unido in Washington, D.C., and Bean & Bean in New York. Equator Coffees has an especially direct connection to Panama through Finca Sophia, the Geisha farm co-owned by its founders. Pigot’s Tectonic Coffee in West Hollywood also offers Geisha from Finca La Tanairi in Honduras, which he acknowledges is “pricey, but not crazy.” Proud Mary, with cafés in Portland and Austin, once made headlines for offering an award-winning Panama Geisha for $150 a cup.

Coffee Tourism

Koyner says a new generation of coffee drinkers wants more than flavor. For these “fourth-wave buyers,” he says, coffee is “a place, a story, the people. You have to incorporate the whole experience: the microclimate, the valley, the plant’s environment.”

Anand sees coffee becoming part of travel itineraries alongside restaurants, wine bars, cocktail bars, and museums. "Coffee has become a new tool of tourism," he says. "Now it's one of the things you explore when you go to a city." He has become a coffee tourist himself, seeking out cafés wherever he travels and carrying beans, a Comandante grinder, and an AeroPress when good coffee is harder to find.

Kahn experienced that immersion firsthand during Panama’s 2025 Geisha harvest, when his friend Mario Castrellón, chef and founder of Maito, invited him to Chiriquí. They trekked through moss- and mushroom-covered cloud forest to reach coffee trees heavy with red cherries. “We kept referring to the region as Narnia,” Kahn says. “We felt like we were in a Terrence Malick film.”

Alongside Ngäbe harvesters, Kahn picked and sorted cherries before helping transfer them into drums for fermentation. Then came coffee. “Sipping a hand-brewed Geisha while standing in an ancient primary forest more than 2,200 meters high overlooking the Volcán Barú, covered in mud, exhausted from a four-plus-hour hike, icy fingers from harvesting wet cherries in the cold fog – this was the single greatest cup of coffee I've ever had,” he says. “It still haunts me.”

That night, he found himself surrounded by what he calls “coffee royalty: the Petersons from Hacienda La Esmeralda, Graciano Cruz, Justin Boudeman, Wilford Lamastus, Kotowa, etc.”

Launched by Chanis in 2017, La Cosecha brings visitors into Chiriquí’s Geisha culture through farm visits, private-lot tastings, cuppings, workshops, gastronomy, and music. “You can have the best coffee in the world, but if you don't have touristic infrastructure, no one can visit your finca,” he says. Working with local producers, he helped develop visitor experiences that are more “fun, sexy, and entertaining.”

At the 2025 event, Hacienda La Esmeralda’s record-breaking 98-point Washed Geisha was available to taste before it went to auction. Chanis admits he went back for five samples.

For travelers in Panama City, Sofitel Legend Casco Viejo offers the Panamanian Coffee Ritual. The elegant Geisha tasting pairs expertly brewed Geisha with three savory and sweet bites designed specifically for each coffee.