Coffee Sketcher

Kelly Hartmann

Properties3
descriptionThird-generation Panamanian coffee grower — one of five siblings who inherited Finca Hartmann in Santa Clara, and the farm manager who runs the award-winning Finca Sophia on the ground.
tagsperson, panama, producer
aliasesKelly Hartman, Hartmann, Kelly

8 min read

Kelly Hartmann

Kelly Hartmann is a Panamanian coffee farmer with a foot in two well-known estates. He is the youngest of the five children of Ratibor Hartmann, and one of the five siblings who together inherited Finca Hartmann in Santa Clara, Renacimiento, in the Chiriquí highlands (Proud Mary Academy, accessed 2026-07-23; Kima Coffee, accessed 2026-07-23). He is also the farm manager of Finca Sophia — the California-backed high-altitude Geisha project that has twice won the washed Geisha title at Best of Panama (Breville — Faces of Coffee, accessed 2026-07-23).

The thing he is known for is not a lot or a price. It is being the person actually on the mountain: the family name gets printed on bags, and Kelly is one of the people making the coffee happen.

Story

The family story starts with his grandfather, Alois Hartmann, who left Moravia — then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now the Czech Republic — and settled in Panama in 1912 (Kima Coffee, accessed 2026-07-23; Proud Mary Academy, accessed 2026-07-23). His son Ratibor Hartmann turned 100 hectares of virgin rainforest inherited from Alois into the coffee farm known today as Finca Hartmann, sitting right up against the Costa Rican border beside Parque Internacional La Amistad (Proud Mary Academy, accessed 2026-07-23).

Ratibor married Dinorah Sandí of Costa Rica and they had five children — Ratibor Jr., Allan, Alexander, Aliss and Kelly — and the land is now shared between them (Proud Mary Academy, accessed 2026-07-23; Kima Coffee, accessed 2026-07-23). Both sources call the Hartmanns one of the pioneering families of specialty coffee in Panama. So when a roaster’s bag says “Hartmann family,” it means an estate Kelly co-owns with four siblings, not a single named producer.

He did not start in coffee. Kelly went to university and first worked installing technical equipment before coming back to the farm — which is roughly why he ended up in the job he has (Breville, accessed 2026-07-23).

What he actually does at Finca Sophia

Finca Sophia was founded in 2008 by a US–Panamanian group — Willem Boot, Helen Russell of Equator Coffees, Brooke McDonnell and partner David Pohl — to find out how high Geisha can be grown before the plant gives up. Kelly is the one running it day to day, about nine miles from the Costa Rican border (Breville, accessed 2026-07-23).

His remit, in Breville’s words, is “planning the building of better soil, plant nutrition, shade management, technical infrastructure and the management of the foreman, Angel” (Breville, accessed 2026-07-23). In plainer terms:

  • Soil and nutrition — at 2,000 metres the cherries ripen slowly and the plants are permanently stressed, so feeding them is the whole game. He has been converting the farm’s irrigation system into a fertigation system, meaning fertiliser is dissolved into the water and delivered to the roots rather than spread on the ground.
  • Shade management — deciding which trees stand over the coffee and how much light gets through. The farm planted 10,000 shade trees in its build-out.
  • Infrastructure and people — worker housing, and trails across terrain steep enough that getting cherry off the hill is a real problem.
  • Watching the weather break things — monitoring climate-driven plant stress and disease.

He also manages neighbouring affiliated farms, and has a teenage daughter starting to take an interest in the work (Breville, accessed 2026-07-23).

He is additionally listed — as “Kelly Hartman” — on Boot Coffee’s team page as its Coffee Farming Specialist, on the same roster as Willem Boot and David Pohl (Boot Coffee — our team, accessed 2026-07-23). That is a first-party source for his standing in this circle, and it is the reason the alias “Hartman” without the second n keeps appearing.

The family farm

Finca Hartmann is not one block of land but a spread of plots at different heights. The Santa Clara section sits at roughly 1,300–1,500 m, with higher sections above that, and the family’s Finca Guarumo reaching about 1,800 m (Proud Mary Academy, accessed 2026-07-23). Kima gives the main farm as 1,400 m with plots between 1,300 and 2,000 m (Kima Coffee, accessed 2026-07-23). Individual lots sold abroad have been labelled anywhere from 1,250 m to 1,900 m (Proud Mary Coffee, accessed 2026-07-23; Wes Ngopi, accessed 2026-07-23).

Santa Clara grows Caturra, Catuai, Pacamara and Maragogipe, with Geisha and other specialty varieties at the higher elevations (Proud Mary Academy, accessed 2026-07-23). Nearly 100 hectares of forest reserve adjoin La Amistad national park — the family kept the trees rather than planting them out (Kima Coffee, accessed 2026-07-23).

For its natural coffees — dried whole in the fruit, skin and all, so the sugars in the pulp soak into the bean — Kima’s profile of a Hartmann lot describes cherries picked at peak ripeness and laid on raised beds, dried in open air for 12–17 days, then finished in mechanical dryers down to 11–11.5% moisture, on a principle of “slow drying, little heat, lots of airflow” (Kima Coffee, accessed 2026-07-23). Drying slowly is what keeps a natural tasting like fruit instead of like ferment. The family is said to be strict that no water touches the cherries between picking and the beds, so nothing washes the sugars off.

To verify — is this one person or two?

The engine research report treated the Kelly Hartmann of Finca Sophia and the Kelly Hartmann who is Ratibor’s son at Finca Hartmann as possibly two different people, and deliberately kept their facts apart. The evidence gathered here points the other way: Breville’s profile of the Finca Sophia farm manager describes him as a third-generation coffee farmer, the youngest of five children, whose father is Ratibor (“Chicho”) (Breville, accessed 2026-07-23) — which matches the Finca Hartmann family exactly. This note therefore treats them as one person. No single source states both halves outright, so if you find a source that separates them, revisit this.

To verify — dates, records and one family-tree conflict

  • When Finca Hartmann was founded. Kima dates Ratibor’s founding of the farm to 1940 (Kima Coffee, accessed 2026-07-23); Proud Mary Academy says the 1960s (Proud Mary Academy, accessed 2026-07-23). Both agree on the 100 hectares inherited from Alois. The year is unsettled — don’t quote either.
  • The 1966 marriage and Alois’s 1891 birth / 1970 death. These come from Kima only and were not corroborated elsewhere.
  • No competition results, cupping scores or auction prices under his own name. Nothing name-specific to “Kelly Hartmann” was found in Best of Panama, SCA, CQI or ACE records. Finca Sophia’s placings belong to the farm, not to him personally, and Finca Hartmann lots are credited to the family. Retail prices on roaster sites are for roasted coffee, not farm-gate or auction prices.
  • No birth date or age is published in any profile found.
  • A conflicting Hartmann family tree. The Jean Paul Langenstein note carries a retailer’s claim that he is married to Yessie Hartmann, “daughter of Ratibor and Tessie Hartmann.” The sources here name Ratibor’s wife as Dinorah Sandí and list five children with no Yessie among them. Either a different branch, a second marriage, or a retailer error — unresolved.
  • Finca Sophia’s own site no longer names him. Existing notes in this wiki state that the farm’s homepage lists Boot, Pohl and Kelly Hartmann as stewards. Checked on 2026-07-23, fincasophia.com/the-farm names no individuals at all. The farm-manager role still stands on Breville and on SCAP’s profile, but the “stewards” wording can no longer be sourced to the farm.
  • The Hartmann processing details above come from one roaster’s description of one lot. They read like producer-supplied technical data, but no second source confirms the drying days or moisture figures.

No personal website or independent web presence for Kelly Hartmann was found; the family farm’s Facebook page is the closest thing to a first-party source. The domain fincahartmann.com is not the farm — checked 2026-07-23, it hosts an unrelated finance blog.

Sources

  1. Breville — Faces of Coffee: Kelly Hartmann — accessed 2026-07-23
  2. Proud Mary Academy — Producer: Hartmann Family, Santa Clara, Panama — accessed 2026-07-23
  3. Kima Coffee — Hartmann Natural, Café de Panamá — accessed 2026-07-23
  4. Finca Sophia — the farm — accessed 2026-07-23
  5. Finca Hartmann — Facebook page — accessed 2026-07-23
  6. Proud Mary Coffee — Panama, Finca Hartmann, Caturra, Natural — accessed 2026-07-23
  7. Wes Ngopi — Panama, Finca Hartmann, Dark Room Washed Eloy — accessed 2026-07-23
  8. Boot Coffee — our team — accessed 2026-07-23

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