Garrido Specialty Coffee Roasters

Garrido Specialty Coffee Roasters is the trading name of the Garrido family’s coffee business in Boquete, Chiriquí, Panama. It is three things at once: a grower with several highland farms, a roaster selling finished coffee, and a hired mill that processes other people’s harvests for a fee.¹²³ Its base is at Calle Raideep Lal, Alto Boquete, under the sign Garrido Coffee Highland.¹

Why it matters here: this is the family behind Mokkita, the very small-bean variety that grows on one farm on earth and that won the non-Geisha category at Best of Panama — the rare case of a Panamanian headline coffee that is not a Geisha.³

The family

The business was founded in 1959 by Teodoro Garrido, who planted the family’s first farm in the Boquete highlands.¹⁴ It is run today by his daughters Gissell and Liliana Garrido, alongside their mother Irma.¹⁴ The official site describes the family as having spent “over 60 years cultivating excellence in the highlands of Boquete.”¹

The family also uses the umbrella name Garrido’s Coffee & Estates for its farms, and Café Garrido for retail coffee.³⁵

The farms

The company’s own estates page lists four farms, all in Boquete:⁶

	Estate	Altitude
1	El Palomar – Cantera	1,300–1,450 m
2	Volcancito	1,300–1,450 m
3	Margarita Village	900–1,210 m
4	Los Rosales	1,650–1,700 m

The family’s best-known farm, Mama Cata — the 1911-planted, 50-hectare estate in Alto Quiel where Mokkita grows — has its own note here, and does not appear on the current official estates page.⁶ See the To-verify box below.

Varieties

The official varieties page names Mokkita, Geisha, Pacamara, Catuaí (including a “Catuai SH3” selection), Bourbon, SL28, Ethiope, and Rume Sudán / Centroamericano H1.⁷ The last group is unusual for Panama: Rume Sudan is a wild Ethiopian-descended type used mostly in breeding, and Centroamericano H1 is a laboratory-bred hybrid — planting them signals a farm experimenting rather than repeating the region’s standard Caturra-and-Geisha script.

Two get published tasting notes: Mokkita — “tropical, mango, peach, passion fruit, rounded floral”; Geisha — “elegant profile, floral, jasmine, bergamot, citrus fruits.”⁷ The family’s older planting list, from the 2021 press profile, adds Caturra and Typica.³

Mokkita and Best of Panama

Mokkita was picked out in 2008 by the Japanese taster Mamoru Taguchi of Tokyo’s Cafe Bach, a former president of the Japan Specialty Coffee Association, during a cupping of the family’s coffees — found in the cup by a visitor rather than selected in the field.³

At the XXIV Best of Panama, held online in 2020, Mokkita took first place in the natural coffees category with a final score of 91; one international judge on the panel gave it 93.³ The company still leads with that result, describing Mokkita as “internationally recognized and awarded at the Best of Panama competition.”¹ Full lot-by-lot detail lives on the Mama Cata note; Best of Panama publishes no browsable past-results archive, which is the standing problem tracked at Best of Panama results archive. For what a 91-point score means, see Coffee scoring.

What the business sells

Processing for hire. Garrido runs a dry mill that takes in other producers’ high-quality lots and charges per pound of net weight received, per process, with better rates at larger volumes.² The four services offered are:²

• Milling (pilado) — stripping the dried parchment husk off the bean.
• Size grading (zaranda) — shaking the beans over screens so each bag holds one bean size.
• Density selection (Oliver) — a vibrating air table that floats off the light, under-developed beans.
• Electronic sorting — a camera-and-air-jet machine that ejects discoloured or defective beans one at a time.

Those four steps are the standard finishing line between a dried lot and an export-ready bag, and offering them to neighbours is how a mid-sized Boquete estate earns from equipment it bought for itself.

Roasted coffee. The 2021 press profile describes roasting, grinding, consulting and full laboratory sampling, sold online with delivery in Panama City and freight shipping to the other provinces.³ The current website carries no shop or price list.¹

To verify

• Where Mama Cata sits in the group. The Mama Cata note (from a 2021 press profile and a green-coffee trade profile) calls Mama Cata the flagship of a four-farm group — Mama Cata, Volcancito, Margarita and El Palomar.³⁵ The company’s current official estates page lists a different four — El Palomar–Cantera, Volcancito, Margarita Village and Los Rosales — with no mention of Mama Cata.⁶ This could be a sale, a family split, a rename, or simply an incomplete website. Unresolved; do not treat either list as the settled portfolio.
• Conflicting altitudes. The official estates page gives Volcancito and El Palomar–Cantera as 1,300–1,450 m and Margarita Village as 900–1,210 m;⁶ the trade profile behind the Mama Cata note puts Volcancito, Margarita and El Palomar all at 1,200–1,475 m.⁵ Neither figure is corroborated.
• Two handles, two mailboxes. The 2021 article gives Instagram @garridospecialtycoffeeroasters and email garridocoffee@gmail.com;³ the official site gives Instagram @garridospecialtycoffee and admin@garridocoffee.com.¹ The WhatsApp number +507 6861-8880 is identical in both, which is what ties the website to the family — but which account is current is not stated anywhere.
• “No official website” is now out of date. The Mama Cata and Mokkita notes both record that the family published only Instagram, email and WhatsApp. garridocoffee.com exists and is the family’s own site.¹ It still carries no page for Mama Cata itself, so the farm-specific caveat stands.
• How long, and which generation. The 2021 article says “over 50 years” in coffee and second-generation management;³ the site says over 60 years and names two daughters plus their mother, which reads as second-and-third generation.¹ Both can be true at different dates, but neither figure should be quoted as precise.

Related

• Mama Cata — the family’s competition farm, and the only place Mokkita grows
• Mokkita — the variety, and the Best of Panama win behind the company’s reputation
• Best of Panama · Best of Panama results archive · SCAP — the competition and the body that runs it
• Hacienda La Esmeralda · Elida Estate · Café Kotowa — the other Boquete estate businesses
• Dry milling — the process Garrido sells to other producers
• Geisha · Caturra · Catuaí · Typica · Pacamara · Bourbon · SL28 — what is planted
• Coffee roasting · Specialty coffee

Official links

• Official site — Garrido Specialty Coffee

Footnotes

1. Garrido Specialty Coffee — official site ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰

2. Garrido Specialty Coffee — Processing Services ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. The Visitor Panama — Garrido Specialty Coffee Roasters: coffee tradition of international success ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰

4. Proud Mary Coffee — Panama, Mama Cata Estate, Geisha, Natural ↩ ↩²

5. Brisa Trade — Garrido’s Coffee & Estates farm profile ↩ ↩² ↩³

6. Garrido Specialty Coffee — Our Estates ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

7. Garrido Specialty Coffee — Varieties ↩ ↩²