How should Pacamara coffee beans be roasted? Why are Pacamara coffee beans so large?

The Rare Nicaraguan Pacamara Variety

The rare Pacamara variety is special in part because it is produced in such limited quantities. It is an improved variety bred from Pacas and Maragogype, refined under El Salvador's natural growing conditions. Big beans do not automatically mean better quality — in fact, Nicaraguan Pacamara beans are slightly smaller than Maragogype beans. Locally, Pacamara commands a price three times higher than ordinary beans, making it as precious as pearls. It is an exceptionally well-balanced coffee, and a City roast brings out its best characteristics: a dry aroma of sweet fruit, a wet aroma of berries, gentle acidity, and subtle sweetness.

The Birth of Pacamara

This legendary variety has a unique plant morphology and green bean appearance — huge leaves, a tall tree structure, enormous green beans — which earned it the title of El Salvador's eccentric variety.

It once remained obscure, and even when it first appeared at the 2003/2004 Cup of Excellence competition, judges hesitated to give it high scores because its flavor profile was so unusually peculiar.

It was not until the 2005 Cup of Excellence that it began to shine. In 2006 it swept the top four positions in El Salvador's Cup of Excellence. From 2008 to 2010, the Pacamara from Finca Injerto dominated Guatemala's Cup of Excellence, winning the championship for three consecutive years.

From that moment it secured its standing as a leader in the green coffee world — and unlike naturally evolved or naturally hybridized varieties such as Geisha, Bourbon, and Typica, Pacamara was not a product of nature but the work of a group of outstanding Salvadoran coffee breeders.

In 1958, more than half a century ago, the Genetics and Breeding Department of the Salvadoran Coffee Research Institute (ISIC) first crossed the Bourbon variety Pacas with the Typica variety Maragogype.

Because crossing two pure lines produces F1 offspring with many heterozygous gene pairs — put simply, a very impure bloodline — multiple generations of self-pollination were required to separate traits and purify the genes.

Each generation of self-pollination had to begin with manual pollination, followed by seedling cultivation, planting, and growth to maturity — a process that alone took 3-4 years. On top of that, measuring the performance of numerous variant offspring and selecting the lines with desirable traits was even more time-consuming and labor-intensive.

Then came more self-pollination, more cultivation to maturity, and more selection. After five generations (F5), thirty years had passed — nearly the entire career of a young breeding expert — before the variety was finally developed.

In reality, though, because it underwent only five generations of self-pollination purification, the new variety still contains a small number of heterozygous gene pairs. As a result, some Pacamara traits still occasionally separate out and reveal characteristics inherited from either Pacas or Maragogype.

FrontStreet Coffee's Pacamara Coffee Roasting Recommendations

Guatemalan SHB beans are very hard, so to let them develop fully and express their flavor while preserving Guatemala's excellent acidity, roasting can take an "acid development" approach: raise the heat at the yellowing point and keep the temperature curve climbing steeply, which enhances aroma and encourages development through first crack. A steeper rise also helps drive off some of the peppery notes. When first crack becomes dense, reduce the heat for "sweetness enhancement" to build sweet flavors. Before dropping the beans, turn off the heat and let the batch coast to add body and maturity. The smoky notes of Huehuetenango grow more pronounced at darker roasts, and combined with Pacamara's peppery character, a lighter roast level is the better choice. So we designed a roast that drops the beans after developing about 13 degrees past the start of first crack, placing the beans near the end of first crack — in the light roast category.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Geisha is one of the most beloved varieties in Arabica coffee, celebrated for its distinctive floral aroma and superb sweet-tart balance, and its low yield, weak disease resistance, and demanding cultivation keep prices high. On the Panama side, FrontStreet's Esmeralda Red Label and Green Label Geisha show the estate's two grading tiers: the Red Label (Esmeralda Special) is grown at 1600-1800 meters and every lot must cup above 90 points, each carrying its own lot number from a single small plot, while the Green Label (Private Collection) blends several plots to capture the estate's signature high-altitude character at a friendlier price.

For newcomers, FrontStreet typically points to the Panama Boquete Geisha, an entry-level Geisha that delivers classic Panama orange-blossom-and-honey notes, an oolong tea-like quality, and delicate, layered fruit acidity. Ethiopia, coffee's birthplace, has its own Geisha estates: FrontStreet's Geisha Village Gold Label (the Geisha 1931 variety, about 10% of the village's output and a frequent choice of competition baristas) is carefully sun-dried for a complex, rich cup, while the Red Label (the Gori Gesha variety, around 15% of production, scoring 88 or above on the SCA 100-point scale) is a single-terroir series with fully traceable farm-block, variety, and processing-date information. For a brighter, fruitier profile, the Grana Estate Geisha from the Yirgacheffe area — a rare single-variety estate with a processing station founded in 2014 and 700 hectares under its care — is hand-picked and dried on raised beds for 14-20 days, then roasted light-to-medium for bright citrus acidity, elegant ginger-lily aromatics, ripe-fruit sweetness, and a silky, refined finish.

Geisha is a light-to-medium roast with a dense bean that tends to sink and block the dripper, so FrontStreet recommends grinding to about fine granulated sugar size — roughly 78% passing a standard No. 20 sieve — and brewing at 91°C. A typical pour-over uses 15g in a small Hario V60 at 1:16: start the timer, pour to 30g for a 30-second bloom, pulse-pour in small circles to 125g, wait until the bed drains halfway, then continue in small circles to 225g, finishing in about 2 minutes 10 seconds to 2 minutes 20 seconds. Geisha also makes an excellent SOE; the medium-roasted Grana Estate Geisha pulls to an espresso of dried apricot, caramel, and nuts, and with 20g in at a 1:2 ratio over 25 seconds for 40g out you can build an Americano (1:5, 200g hot water, for orange, nut, and blueberry notes) or a latte (200g milk, for a creamy butter-cookie texture).