El Paraiso Geisha Zeo

// Published March 16, 2024 by mgualt

14g/240ml single pour at 96-98C, Dan Eils recipe water, Behmor home roast (see graphic below)

This coffee was so impressive and unique that I had to review it here.

Sweet wildflower aroma consistent with the geisha-jasmine association but it is a subtle honey-like fragrance. Mouthfeel is medium gripping, coating the whole mouth and especially the throat and bottom of mouth. There is a cool bitterness under the sweetness which leads to a long crisp numbing aftertaste. Some menthol throat cooling.

Overall the taste and aroma are ultra pure geisha, no roast notes, no almond, no baking spices, and no extreme acidity. The fruit notes are somewhere around peach, yellow plum, and mango. The flavour overall is reminiscent of low-roast single-origin chocolate, where the fruit acidity shines through the bitterness.

The effect of the coffee is even more special than the aroma/taste: wonderful immediate uplifting frisson, clarity in the whole system, clear vision, crisp breathing, and a sense of calm alertness, no jittery feeling, with a slight numbing of the mouth and throat. A very special experience which goes beyond even the best coffees I’ve had from El Paraiso.

This coffee was processed with a new method: El Paraiso is known for their luxurious fermentation, but in this case they developed a minimal fermentation method: “the cherries are ozonated to reduce the microbial presence as much as possible before they are rapidly frozen in 4 hours at -40°C. The frozen cherries are then freeze dried in a low pressure system with zeolite to sublimate the water. Zeolite is a porous material with distinct adsorption properties that aid this sublimation process in selectively removing water while preserving as much of the aromatics in the coffee as possible.”

This is probably the most impressive coffee I’ve had so far, thanks to Blake for sourcing and roasting this one!

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