Lamastus Family Estates

Lamastus Family Estates is the family coffee business of Boquete, in Panama’s Chiriquí highlands. It is the company behind Elida Estate — the farm that has twice reset the world record price for green (unroasted) coffee — and it also owns two neighbouring farms, Luito and El Burro.¹ The business is run today by Wilford Lamastus and his son Wilford Jr., the third and fourth generations of the same family.¹

The short version: one family, three farms on the slopes of the same volcano, and a single variety — Geisha — that turned a century-old Boquete farm into the most expensive coffee address in the world.

How the family got here

The founder was Robert Lamastus, an American who came to Panama as part of the workforce that built the Panama Canal and stayed on, establishing a coffee farm in the Boquete highlands in 1918.¹² Coffee has been grown on that land continuously ever since. His grandson and great-grandson — Wilford and Wilford Jr. — run the farms more than a century later.¹

The Geisha chapter is much more recent. The “Torre” section of Elida Estate was the first part of the farm planted to Geisha, in 2005, using seedlings descended from the Hacienda La Esmeralda lineage — planted, in other words, immediately after Esmeralda’s famous Best of Panama entry showed the world what the variety could do.¹ Torre is the same block that produced the family’s 2024 world-record lot.

To verify

The founding year is reported two ways. The family’s own materials and producer profiles consistently give 1918 as the start of coffee growing at Elida.²¹ A LinkedIn company profile for the business instead lists a founding year of 1903.³ These are unlikely to describe the same event — 1903 may be a corporate or legal registration date rather than the coffee-farm origin — but the discrepancy is unresolved. Use 1918 for the farm, and do not quote 1903 without a better source.

The three farms

Farm	Character	Notes
Elida Estate	The flagship, and the highest coffee farm in Panama	Climbs the slope of Volcán Barú, with land above the planting line sitting inside Volcán Barú National Park; a climatic “hybrid” between the family’s other two farms1
Luito	The wettest of the three	Sits close to the mountains inside a UNESCO World Heritage area; gets plenty of rain even in the dry season, and cherries ripen nearly year-round1
El Burro	The driest of the three	Furthest from the mountains, with very little dry-season rain — which gives it a sharply defined cycle of rainfall, flowering and cherry maturation1

The farms sit close together but do not behave the same way. Each has its own micro-climate, so each ripens on its own schedule and cups differently — which is why the family separates and sells them as distinct estates rather than blending them.¹

To verify

The farms’ altitudes are reported inconsistently across sources. The family’s own auction site describes Elida at 2,200 m above sea level.⁴ The research behind this note found the family’s shop site quoting 1,700–2,500 m for Elida and 1,575–2,000 m for El Burro,² while the US roaster Klatch Coffee describes the estate as 1,700–2,060 m.⁵ This wiki’s Elida Estate note currently uses 1,700–2,200 m. The upper figure is the one in dispute; quote a single sourced number, not a range assembled from several sites.

What the business does

Unusually for a coffee farm, the family runs the whole chain itself: it grows, processes, exports and now also roasts its own estate coffee, rather than handing green beans to a trader.² Alongside the public Best of Panama auction it runs its own private online auction each year, offering a curated set of lots — 26 in the 2026 edition, described by the family as “524 kg of our finest, most representative Geisha, one carefully selected lot from each micro-terroir, in each process.”⁴ That gives buyers direct, traceable access to individual blocks of the farms — the direct-trade idea taken to its logical end.

The harvest itself is done by hand by Indigenous Ngäbe and Buglé pickers, as on every estate in the Chiriquí highlands.

Competition and auction record

The family’s results are recorded in detail on the farm note — see Elida Estate for the lot-by-lot table. In summary:

	Year	What happened	Result
1	2019	Elida Geisha Green Tip (natural), scored 95.25	**1,029/lb** — the first coffee ever to pass 1,000/lb, to a Saza Coffee-led consortium6
2	2024	Elida Geisha Natural “Torre”, a 20 kg lot	**10,013/kg** (≈ 200,260 for the bag) — world record, again to Saza Coffee of Japan78

Both records were bought by the same Japanese company, and both were natural-process (natural) Geisha lots. See Green coffee auctions for how these sales actually work, and Panama for why this one district produces them.

To verify

The family’s full competition tally is not confirmed. In interviews Wilford Lamastus says the family has won six first places at Best of Panama and four Panama Cups, and that a 2018 Elida lot won both the washed and natural Geisha categories while setting a competition record score.⁹¹⁰ None of this is enumerated on an official source here, and this wiki’s Best of Panama note already flags the widely-quoted 2018 price (~$803/lb) as unverified. Check the official results at bestofpanama.org before quoting any of it.¹¹

The sources also contradict each other on when the family first competed. One interview says the family had enough production to enter Best of Panama in 2004; another says they won it with a Caturra lot in 2002, sold at $2.37/lb.⁹¹⁰ Both cannot be right as stated.

A price figure is quoted loosely. One interview refers to a lot sold “last year” for about 13,000/kg**, and the same interview's title says **13,500/kg — neither matches the documented 2024 record of $10,013/kg.⁹ It may refer to a private-auction lot rather than a Best of Panama lot; do not treat it as a Best of Panama figure.

Related

• Elida Estate — the flagship farm and its record lots
• Wilford Lamastus — the producer who runs the business
• Best of Panama · Panama Cup · Green coffee auctions
• Geisha · Natural process
• Panama · SCAP
• Hacienda La Esmeralda — the neighbouring estate whose Geisha lineage Elida’s Torre block was planted from, and its main rival
• Saza Coffee — the Japanese buyer behind both world records · Klatch Coffee
• Ngäbe-Buglé coffee labour — the workforce that picks the harvest

Official links

• Official site — Lamastus Family Estates auction
• Official site — Lamastus Family Estates shop

Footnotes

1. Proud Mary Academy — Producer: Lamastus Family, Los Naranjos, Boquete, Panama ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰

2. Lamastus Family Estates — Elida Estate (family shop site) ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

3. Lamastus Family Estates — LinkedIn company profile ↩

4. Lamastus Family Estates Auction — the family’s own site ↩ ↩²

5. Klatch Coffee — Lamastus Family Estates collection ↩

6. AgroNosotros — Elida Estate Gesha earns $1,029 per pound ↩

7. LatAm Reports — Geisha: Panama’s luxury coffee sets new price record ↩

8. Casa Solution — $4,500 a pound for Boquete coffee? Yes, really ↩

9. This Coffee Sold for $13,500/kg — Wilford Lamastus on a 100+ Year Coffee Legacy (interview) ↩ ↩² ↩³

10. Acid Makes Coffee Better podcast — Wilford Snr. and Wilford Jnr. Lamastus ↩ ↩²

11. Best of Panama — official competition site ↩