Pot of Gold

Roasted coffee beans go bad in two weeks. Their structure deteriorates, their essences turn sour. Ground coffee is even more unstable, a half-hour time bomb ticking away to total flavor disintegration. In comparison, it takes roughly five days for the Geisha expedition to fall apart.

Everywhere the group ventures, the Geisha seems just out of reach. In the remote village of Gecha, hundreds of wide-eyed children flock to the rarely seen faranjis while officials glare at them warily and say no one is going near their buna without proper documentation. Elsewhere, locals tell them of additional obstacles in their path: murderous forest tribes and bloodthirsty lions leaping from the trees.

To Getinet Kelkle, a longstanding Ethiopian coffee expert accompanying the expedition, these reports, though probably apocryphal, make poetic sense. "I am sure a lion will be guarding Geisha," he laughs. "Why else is it so secret?"

In the town of Bonga, Boot finally loses his titanium-hulled temper. He's just learned from chat-chewing truck drivers that the last two Geisha towns are at least a mud-splattered day trip away -- an extra day the adventurers don't have. "I don't understand why it takes me only two minutes to find out about this, while you had at least two months to discover the information," he thunders to his Ethiopian escorts. As the camera rolls, the Ethiopians say nothing. Only later, away from Boot, do they insist that no one bothered to tell them anything about the Geisha hunt until two days before the expedition started.

After that, back in the Land Cruisers, the grumbling begins. Why wasn't this trip better organized? What have we learned about the Geisha, about Ethiopian coffee? Is this just some sort of faranji field trip? And why the hell are we spending so much time in the trucks?

If the group has discovered anything, it's the daunting odds stacked against them, the colossal unlikelihood of locating any specific kind of coffee in the middle of an Ethiopian forest, much less the Geisha.

On the penultimate day of the expedition, the Land Cruisers stop at a coffee research center, the only one of its kind in the country. Here, lab-coat-clad scientists drop a gasp-eliciting bombshell: The thousand coffee genotypes growing at the research center represent just a tiny fraction of Ethiopia's coffee biodiversity. The rest are complete mysteries, tens of thousands of beans growing in village farms and sprawling jungles that are blended into obscurity or never tasted at all. And no one knows how many nameless coffee tastes have already been lost to the country's widespread deforestation. Even if the wild Geisha still exists in some untouched corner of Ethiopia, differentiating it from all the other genotypes will be a daunting task.

Then the scientists deliver an additional blow: They've found records confirming that the town of Gesha, near Mizan Teferi, where the group stopped near the beginning of the trip, is probably the most likely location of the wild Geisha. The rest of the itinerary may have been a wild goose chase.

On the long drive back to Addis Ababa, Brodsky quietly gazes out the Land Cruiser's window, pondering these setbacks. O'Keefe interrupts his resigned contemplation to show him something remarkable: They are cruising down a road paved with coffee. Beneath their wheels, dried coffee cherries are strewn across the asphalt. It's a grassroots, four-wheeled de-husking operation, they realize, the road-killed remains roasted and sold by locals to drowsy drivers. All over the world, O'Keefe marvels, wealthy plantation owners are spending millions to replicate the kinds of coffee occurring naturally in Ethiopia, while here struggling farmers must resort to processing these perfect beans through highway hit-and-run.

"It's like the Panamanians are working hard to get to the moon, and they get there, and the Ethiopians are already there, essentially by accident!" O'Keefe exclaims over the vehicle's warbling cassette player. If he has his way, however, Ethiopia's coffee will soon rise above the asphalt.

Unlike the rest of the expedition, O'Keefe has accomplished his mission on this trip. Working under Boot for USAID, he's probed the tastebuds of dozens of Ethiopians, running them through a gauntlet of sweet, salty and sour-tasting liquids to unearth the top two "super tasters" of the bunch. This duo will staff southwestern Ethiopia's first-ever cupping lab, slurping and grading and differentiating the coffees produced by the region's tens of thousands of farmers. He's not aiming to turn Ethiopians into java snobs; the cupping lab is the first step toward introducing a vital element long lacked by Ethiopia's coffee industry: quality control.

"We have a historic opportunity on our hands to help millions of farmers worldwide," O'Keefe exclaims. "We have roasters who are developing their consumer market, and consumers who are becoming more and more sophisticated and willing to pay more and more for coffee. Ethiopia has the opportunity to completely get rid of its commodity-coffee market and focus on specialty coffee, just by learning to select out their coffee and present it to the market."