Don Pachi Serracín

Francisco “Don Pachi” Serracín is the Panamanian coffee producer remembered for first bringing Geisha to Panama.

In 1963, he carried Geisha seed — remembered as “Geisha 2722” — from CATIE in Costa Rica to Boquete, Panama. His reason was practical, not culinary: the variety resisted coffee leaf rust. Its extraordinary flavor wasn’t the point yet; that only became clear decades later, when Hacienda La Esmeralda separated a Geisha lot and entered it into Best of Panama in 2004.