Pacamara Coffee

Pacamara is not a place, it is a cross. El Salvador’s Instituto Salvadoreno de Investigaciones del Cafe (ISIC) began combining Pacas and Maragogipe in 1958, chasing a plant with Pacas’ hardiness and Maragogipe’s outsized cup quality in one tree. Pacas itself is a 1949 Bourbon mutation discovered by Fernando Alberto Pacas Figueroa on Finca San Rafael, near the Santa Ana volcano: shorter, stockier, and higher-yielding than standard Bourbon. Maragogipe is an older Typica mutation out of Bahia, Brazil, prized for a huge bean and a bright, citrusy cup but planted by almost nobody because its yields run so low. Stabilizing the cross into a reliably true-breeding F5 generation took roughly 30 years; ISIC did not release Pacamara to growers until the late 1980s.

That instability never fully went away. World Coffee Research still rates Pacamara’s yield potential low and its leaf rust resistance low, and growers commonly report that something like 10 to 20 percent of offspring revert toward one parent instead of growing true to type. The payoff is the same oversized bean Maragogipe was chosen for in the first place: Pacamara beans run large and dense enough that most roasters drop their roast temperature and shrink batch size to keep the outside from scorching before the inside finishes drying out.

Pacamara accounts for roughly 2 percent of El Salvador’s coffee production, against 62 percent Bourbon and 31 percent Pacas, yet it punches far above that share at Cup of Excellence. In 2020, Roberto Vilanova’s natural anaerobic Pacamara took first place at 90.31 points, the first time an anaerobic-processed lot had won the competition in its 17-year history. The following year, Ever Leonel Diaz Perez’s semi-washed Pacamara from Finca Mileydi in Chalatenango tied for first at 91.68. The variety does not win every year anymore. Newer discoveries like the Geisha-related Bernardina variety have started sharing the podium, but no single cultivar shows up there as consistently as Pacamara.

In the cup, the two independently reviewed lots behind this profile lean fruit-forward and dense rather than delicate. Conscious Cup’s natural-process Finca Don Jaime scored 94 on tamarind, dark chocolate, wine barrel, and magnolia notes with a plush, syrupy body, while Red Rooster’s black-honey Finca El Cerro scored 93 on Concord grape, almond nougat, and roasted cacao nib. That combination, big body, winey acidity, and fruit that reads closer to a natural-processed origin coffee than a delicate varietal, is what separates Pacamara from lighter, more floral hybrids like Gesha.