Pacas Coffee

Pacas is the plain-spoken parent in El Salvador’s coffee family. World Coffee Research describes it as a natural Bourbon mutation found in 1949 on a farm of the Pacas family in Santa Ana, and its defining trait is size: a dwarf tree that can be planted at 5,000 to 6,000 plants per hectare. The Salvadoran research institute ISIC began selecting it formally in 1960, and it spread through Central America from there.

The trade-off is disease. WCR rates Pacas as very highly susceptible to coffee leaf rust, and gives it good quality potential at higher elevations. That is why it reads as a workhorse: by the ICO estimate quoted by Perfect Daily Grind, Pacas is around 31 percent of Salvadoran production, far ahead of its famous offspring Pacamara at about 2 percent. (WCR gives a lower figure of about 25 percent; the two sources date from different estimates.)

In the cup, good processing does the work. Bear Lake’s natural Finca San Antonio scored 93 on black cherry, salted caramel, hop flowers and cocoa powder with a crisp, lightly satiny mouthfeel, while Buon Caffe’s honey Finca El Mural also scored 93 on dried apricot, malt syrup, almond brittle and chamomile with a creamy body. Two lots is a small sample, but it shows what Pacas can do when a farm treats it as a specialty variety rather than a volume crop.