Maracaturra

Maracaturra is an arabica coffee variety made by crossing Maragogipe — the giant-bean mutation of Typica — with Caturra, the short Brazilian mutation of Bourbon. The name is the two parents stuck together, exactly like Pacamara, and the goal was the same: keep Maragogipe’s enormous beans, lose Maragogipe’s terrible yield and unmanageable height.¹²

You can spot it in the bag. The beans are so large the trade sells them as “elephant beans,” which is a real commercial advantage and a real roasting problem — a bean that big heats unevenly, so it browns on the outside before the middle is done.

It is a rare coffee. Almost all of it comes from Nicaragua, in small blocks on farms that grow it for the cupping table rather than for volume.

Where it came from

Every source agrees on the parents. For years almost nobody agreed on the place or the date — but there is a research-body account, and it has been hiding in plain sight.

World Coffee Research does describe Maracaturra’s origin. Not on a page of its own — the variety has no catalogue entry, and the URL for one returns a 404³ — but inside the entry for its sister variety Pacamara, where WCR writes that “a similar variety, Maracaturra, likely originated from a natural cross between Caturra x Maragogipe in Nicaragua.”⁴

The same entry gives the rest of the story, and it is the most useful paragraph on this page:⁴

• Initial selections were made by the Nicaraguan Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA) in 1976.
• Those selections were never completed, following the Sandinista revolution.
• Further selections were made by private producers in Central America, but the variety has never been stabilized.

Read plainly: Maracaturra was not bred, it was found — a chance cross in a Nicaraguan field. A state institute started the work of turning that chance plant into a proper variety, the country’s revolution and war interrupted it, and the job was never finished. Everything since has been farmers selecting their own seed on their own land.

That single history explains almost everything else about this coffee. It explains why there is no catalogue entry (an unfinished variety has no finished trait data to publish), why there is no certified seed supply, why the published agronomic description is thin and repetitive, and why the plants themselves vary — which is the subject of the next section.

To verify

The widely repeated “Brazil, late 1800s” origin is almost certainly wrong. Wikipedia and several roaster blogs say Maracaturra arose naturally in Brazil in the late 1800s.⁵⁶ Others put it in Nicaragua in the mid-twentieth century or as late as the 1990s.⁷⁸ All of this now sits against a research-body account naming a country, an institute and a year — Nicaragua, INTA, 1976⁴ — which should be preferred.

The Brazilian version is also chronologically impossible as stated. Maragogipe was found near Maragogipe, Brazil in 1870, but Caturra was not identified until 1915–1918 (both per the World Coffee Research catalogue, via this wiki’s Typica and Caturra notes). A cross cannot predate its younger parent. No source repeating the “late 1800s” date notices the contradiction.

The variety was never finished

This is the fact that separates Maracaturra from every properly released variety on this wiki, and it comes straight from World Coffee Research: the variety has never been stabilized.⁴

“Stabilized” means the plants breed true — save seed from this year’s trees and next year’s trees are the same coffee. Getting there takes many generations of selection, which is exactly the work INTA began in 1976 and never finished. Because it was never finished, a Maracaturra block is not a uniform thing: offspring drift back toward the Caturra and Maragogipe parents, so bean size, plant shape and ripening time all vary within a field, and one farm’s “Maracaturra” need not match another’s.

It is the same problem this wiki records for Pacamara, whose WCR entry says plants “are not stable from one generation to the next” — except Pacamara at least reached an official release with certified seed behind it. Maracaturra has neither. A grower planting it is working from a neighbour’s cuttings and their own cupping table.

This is also a quiet warning about the trait table below. If the variety is not stable, then “large bean,” “compact,” “rust-susceptible” are tendencies across a loose population, not specifications.

To verify

The agronomic description is one paragraph, copied. The sentences about compact stature, abundant foliage, wind resistance, leaf-rust susceptibility and “high level of maintenance” appear in near-identical wording on Wikipedia, Perfect Daily Grind and multiple roaster blogs. Wikipedia cites Perfect Daily Grind and the green-coffee importer Mercanta, and the roasters appear to be repeating the same text. That is one source with many mirrors, not independent corroboration — the underlying trait ratings have never been published by a research institute.

What the plant is like

Trait	Maracaturra	Where it comes from
Species	Coffea arabica	Both parents are arabica
Bean size	Very large (“elephant bean”)	Maragogipe
Leaf size	Large	Maragogipe
Stature	Short, compact, dense foliage	Caturra
Wind damage	Resistant, thanks to the low compact frame	Caturra
Coffee leaf rust	Susceptible — needs high maintenance	Caturra is rated very high susceptibility by World Coffee Research
Yield	Reported as good for a big-bean variety, poor next to a commercial one	The point of the cross

Read the right-hand column and the variety explains itself. Maracaturra is an attempt to buy Maragogipe’s bean size using Caturra’s body — and it inherits Caturra’s rust problem along the way, because that vulnerability came from Bourbon and travels with every Caturra descendant.

The clearest statement of intent comes from the Salvadoran producer Mauricio Salaverria, who planted it looking for “a more productive varietal than both the Maragogype and the Pacamara” that still cupped well.⁹ That is the trade-off in one line: everyone wants the big-bean cup, nobody wants the big-bean harvest.

To verify

Altitude figures don’t line up. Wikipedia gives 1,400–1,600 m; other specialty sources give a broader 1,300–1,800 m as a preference rather than a limit. Both are undercut by the best-documented Maracaturra lot on this wiki: Finca Solidaridad is described at 1,270 m and still scored 90.50 — and that altitude is itself flagged as single-sourced on the farm’s note. Don’t quote a band for this variety.

What it tastes like

The stock description, repeated everywhere, is tropical fruit and bright acidity. No formal sensory rating exists — there is no World Coffee Research quality-potential grade for Maracaturra, because there is no catalogue entry at all.

What there is instead is roasters’ notes on specific lots, which are more concrete and more honest about being one cup on one table:

Lot	Described as	Source
Finca Solidaridad, Nicaragua, washed (2025 Cup of Excellence)	Apricot, hibiscus, mango, orange, maple syrup	Retailer description, via Finca Solidaridad
Albir family lot, Nicaragua	”Juicy ripe plums,” creamy mouthfeel	Steampunk Coffee Roasters
Unspecified lots	Orange, pear, grape, floral, with chocolate and nuts behind	Alchemy Coffee10

Notice how fruit-forward that is for coffees that are mostly washed — washing usually strips a cup back toward cleanliness and acidity rather than pushing it toward mango and plum. That fruitiness is the reason anyone puts up with the variety’s yield.

One practical warning that only the roasters mention: the very large bean is “much more susceptible to roast defects”. A Maracaturra roasted on a curve built for normal beans will scorch outside and stay grassy inside.

Competition record

This is where the variety earns its place, and where the sources need the most care — the Alliance for Coffee Excellence results tables record farm, producer, score and price, but not variety. So a Cup of Excellence placement can be verified from the primary record while the variety attribution still rests on someone’s blog.

	Year	Competition	Lot	Rank	Score	Price	Variety confirmed?
1	2026	Taza de la Excelencia Nicaragua XXII	El Cambalache (Abner Samuel Zavala), washed	1st, washed	not published	auction 29 Jun 2026	Yes — variety named in the official gazette report
2	2025	Cup of Excellence Nicaragua	Solidaridad (Ramón Jarquín), washed	2nd, washed	90.50	$14.00/lb	Yes — variety listed as Maracaturra in the ACE record
3	2021	Cup of Excellence Nicaragua	El Cambalache (Abner Samuel Zavala), honey	2nd	90.75	$30.20 and $30.30/lb	Yes — variety listed as Maracaturra in the ACE record
4	2018	Cup of Excellence Nicaragua	El Cambalache (Abner Samuel Zavala), washed	4th	90.23	not published	Yes — variety listed as Maracaturra in the ACE farm directory
5	2015	Cup of Excellence El Salvador	Himalaya – Divisadero (Mauricio Salaverria)	5th	89.03	$9.70/lb	No — see callout
6	n.d.	Cup of Excellence Nicaragua	Albir family lot	2nd (claimed)	—	—	No — see callout

Nueva Segovia is where this variety’s record actually lives. Abner Samuel Zavala has placed three times at the Nicaragua Cup of Excellence with Maracaturra from Finca El Cambalache, a farm of roughly three hectares: 4th in 2018 at 90.23 (washed, with anaerobic fermentation up to 60 hours), 2nd in 2021 at 90.75 (honey-processed, split into two 231.48 lb lots at $30.20/lb to Dimattina Coffee and $30.30/lb to Kyokuto Fadie Corporation), and 1st in the washed category in 2026.¹¹¹²¹³

That 2026 result is the strongest argument for the variety on this page. The same producer had just won the 2025 washed category with Geisha at $66/lb — the most reputationally loaded variety in coffee — and went back to Maracaturra the following year and won again.

The 2025 result is the other solid one. Finca Solidaridad, a roughly three-hectare smallholding in Matagalpa worked by Ramón Jarquín, entered a washed Maracaturra of 2,553.99 lb, placed second among the washed coffees at 90.50, and sold the lot for $14.00/lb — $35,755.86 to a nine-roaster Buying consortium.¹⁴ Both first-place lots that year, washed and natural, were Geisha — and the washed winner was Zavala’s other farm, La Esperanza.

There is a pattern in those rows worth naming: Maracaturra keeps landing just under the winner. In 2021 El Cambalache missed first by 0.21 points (to Jesus Mountain Coffee Company, 90.96, variety not recorded); in 2025 Solidaridad missed the washed category by 0.23 points, to a Geisha that then sold for more than four times the price. The variety scores with the best coffees in Nicaragua and is consistently outbid by them.

To verify

“Fifth in the Cup of Excellence 2015” is half-confirmed. The ACE record does show a fifth place in 2015 — but in El Salvador, not Nicaragua: Himalaya – Divisadero, Mauricio Arturo Salaverria Caceres, 89.03, sold at $9.70/lb.¹⁵ The ACE table records no variety, so the claim that this lot was Maracaturra comes only from Perfect Daily Grind, which profiles the same farm and says the variety “has already won fifth place in Cup of Excellence 2015.” Complicating it further, that article describes Salaverria as planning to process his Maracaturra cherries — future tense, in late 2016. The Nicaraguan reading is contradicted outright: fifth place in the 2015 Nicaragua Cup of Excellence was Fila Alta, Henry Alexander Marin, 88.85,¹⁶ and Wikipedia’s version of the claim cites two Nicaraguan newspapers alongside the Salvadoran-farm article.

To verify

An unattributed second place. Steampunk Coffee Roasters, selling a Maracaturra from growers Martha and Ana Albir in Nicaragua, write that “a Maracaturra lot came in second at the Nicaragua Cup of Excellence competition this year, coming in less than a quarter point under two tying Geisha lots”. The post carries no year. The arithmetic is suggestive — the 2025 Nicaragua gap between the winning washed Geisha (90.73) and Finca Solidaridad’s Maracaturra (90.50) is exactly 0.23 points — but the producers named are different people, and the “two tying Geisha lots” detail is not in this wiki’s record of that competition.

A second candidate year has since turned up, and it fits the wording better. In 2021, a Maracaturra also came second in Nicaragua — El Cambalache at 90.75, 0.21 points under the winner (Jesus Mountain Coffee Company, 90.96), and El Cambalache’s own coffee was split into two lots, 2a and 2b, that tied at the same score. Splitting a top lot in two is routine here, so the winner may well have been split the same way — which would give literal “two tying” lots above a Maracaturra. But ACE’s 2021 table records no varieties, so whether the winning lots were Geisha is unknown, and the Albir family is still not the producer in either year. Both 2021 and 2025 remain candidates. Confirm against the Alliance for Coffee Excellence archive before repeating.

Where it is grown

Reported growing countries are Nicaragua, El Salvador and Brazil, with scattered mentions of Guatemala, Honduras and elsewhere in Central America. Sources agree on two things: it is most associated with Nicaragua, and it is rare anywhere — small experimental blocks and single-farm specialty lots, not commercial plantings.

World Coffee Research’s account fits that map exactly. The variety arose in Nicaragua and the unfinished selection work afterwards was done by “private producers in Central America”⁴ — which is precisely how a coffee ends up scattered across several neighbouring countries in small farm-by-farm plantings with no national programme anywhere.

That rarity is not an accident of fashion. A variety that was never stabilized has no certified seed supply, no published trait data and no breeding programme behind it. A farmer planting Maracaturra is doing it on a neighbour’s recommendation and their own cupping table, which is exactly the profile of a coffee that shows up at competitions and almost nowhere else.

To verify

Three named Maracaturra farms, each on a single source. Beyond the competition record above, three growers are attached to this variety in trade writing, and none is corroborated by a second independent source:

• Finca El Guaco, Nicaragua — a Maracaturra tasted and described by the Norwegian roaster Tim Wendelboe, who calls it a Maragogipe × Caturra hybrid with citrus and tropical fruit. The source is a social-media video description; altitude, processing and ownership are not given.
• Finca El Socorro, Guatemala — sold by Onyx Coffee Lab as “Guatemala El Socorro Maracaturra,” attributed to a producer named Juan Diego and to a farm described as a Cup of Excellence–winning estate, with notes of chamomile and raw sugar. The retailer page could not be fetched to confirm (the site rate-limited the request), so treat the producer name, processing and altitude as unconfirmed. If it holds, it is this wiki’s only documented Guatemalan Maracaturra.
• Byron Corrales, Nicaragua — described by one trade blog as growing certified-organic Maracaturra.¹ The certifying body, processing and altitude are not stated anywhere found.

Related

• Maragogipe — the giant-bean Typica mutation that gives Maracaturra its size
• Caturra — the dwarf Bourbon mutation that gives it its frame, its yield and its rust problem
• Pacamara — the other big-bean cross, Pacas × Maragogipe, bred deliberately in El Salvador
• Typica · Bourbon — the two founding varieties standing behind both parents
• Coffee leaf rust — the disease it inherited
• World Coffee Research — gives it no catalogue entry of its own, but records its Nicaraguan origin inside the Pacamara entry
• Nicaragua — where the original chance cross happened, and where nearly all of it still grows
• Instituto Nicaragüense de Tecnología Agropecuaria — the state institute that began selecting it in 1976 and never finished
• Tim Wendelboe · Onyx Coffee Lab — two roasters who have sold single-farm Maracaturra lots
• Finca Solidaridad · Ramón Jarquín — the best-documented Maracaturra lot on this wiki
• Finca El Cambalache · Abner Samuel Zavala — the Nueva Segovia farm that has placed three times with this variety, in three different processing styles
• Anaerobic fermentation · Honey process — the two processes behind El Cambalache’s 2018 and 2021 results
• Cup of Excellence · Alliance for Coffee Excellence — the competition and the body whose results tables verify (and don’t verify) the claims above
• Buying consortium — how the 2025 Solidaridad lot was actually bought
• Coffee scoring · Cupping — what a 90.50 means

Official links

• Official site — World Coffee Research variety catalogue — the industry’s reference database. Maracaturra has no entry of its own (the URL 404s); its parents Maragogipe and Caturra do, and the Pacamara entry is where WCR’s account of Maracaturra’s origin actually lives.
• Official results — Alliance for Coffee Excellence — the primary record for every competition claim on this page

Footnotes

1. Brewlogy — Maracaturra coffee ↩ ↩²

2. Wikipedia — List of coffee varieties ↩

3. World Coffee Research — variety catalogue ↩

4. World Coffee Research — Pacamara (the catalogue entry that carries WCR’s account of Maracaturra’s Nicaraguan origin, INTA’s 1976 selections, and the variety never having been stabilized) ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

5. Wikipedia — Maracaturra coffee ↩

6. Steampunk Coffee Roasters — There’s a lot to love about Maracaturra ↩

7. Green Coffee Collective — Maracaturra: Nicaraguan elephant bean hybrid ↩

8. Singular Coffee — Maracaturra: un cultivar de café exotique ↩

9. Perfect Daily Grind — Maracaturra: why a CoE-winning farm grows hybrid varietals ↩

10. Alchemy’s A–Z of Coffee: M is for Maracaturra ↩

11. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Nicaragua 2021 results and auction ↩

12. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — farm directory entry 90.23, El Cambalache, Nicaragua 2018 ↩

13. La Gaceta (Nicaragua) — Cafés de Nueva Segovia destacan en la XXII edición de la Taza de la Excelencia Nicaragua 2026 ↩

14. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Nicaragua 2025 results and auction ↩

15. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — El Salvador 2015 results and auction ↩

16. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Nicaragua 2015 results and auction ↩