Maracaturra Coffee

Maracaturra is one more branch off the same giant-bean family tree as Maragogype and Pacamara, but this one runs through Nicaragua rather than El Salvador. Coffee Review’s own account credits Byron Corrales of Finca Los Pinos, in the Arenal forest reserve outside Matagalpa, with developing the cross of Maragogype and Caturra that still carries his farm’s coffee into specialty lists today. Ozone Coffee’s variety history adds an official chapter to that story: Nicaragua’s state agricultural institute, INTA, began breeding selections from Maracaturra material in 1976, a program the Sandinista revolution left unfinished. Private producers picked up the selection work afterward, which is part of why the variety, unlike Pacamara, has never been stabilized into a single true-breeding line.

The cross keeps Maragogype’s oversized bean and Caturra’s shorter, high-yielding, wind-resistant growth habit, but it also inherits Caturra’s weak point: Maracaturra stays susceptible to coffee leaf rust and needs active management. Perfect Daily Grind’s reporting traces one path the variety took south of its home country, where El Salvador’s Mauricio Salaverria learned of it from Procafe’s Manuel Meza, who had seen it growing in Matagalpa, and planted it hoping for something more productive than either Maragogype or Pacamara. A Maracaturra lot took fifth place at Nicaragua’s 2015 Cup of Excellence, evidence the variety can cup well even without ever having been formally fixed.

The two independently reviewed lots behind this profile show that range rather than a single house style. Bear Lake Coffee’s washed lot from Guatemala’s Finca El Socorro scored 94 in February 2025 on dried peach, walnut, sugarcane, and baking chocolate, while Paradise Roasters’ Santa Lucila lot from Nicaragua, closer to the variety’s own home ground, scored 93 in January 2016 on lemon zest, almond, butterscotch, and rosemary flower. Both share the tart, syrupy structure and bright acidity roasters keep coming back to. Corrales’s own farm, at roughly 1,500 m in Matagalpa’s Arenal forest reserve, still grows Maracaturra for a handful of long-term buyers, an altitude in line with the high-elevation Central American farms where the variety’s better lots tend to come from.