Pacamara
Pacamara is a coffee variety made on purpose, in a laboratory, in El Salvador. It is a cross of two mutations: Pacas, a dwarf form of Bourbon found on a Salvadoran farm, and Maragogipe, a giant-bean form of Typica found in Brazil. The name is just the two parents jammed together — Paca + Mara.
The breeder was the Instituto Salvadoreño de Investigaciones del Café (ISIC), El Salvador’s national coffee research institute. World Coffee Research records the parentage as “Pacas x Maragogipe,” the breeder as ISIC, and places Pacamara genetically in the Bourbon–Typica group — which is exactly what a cross of a Bourbon mutant and a Typica mutant should be (World Coffee Research — Pacamara, accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch).
What the cross was after is easy to read off the parents. Maragogipe gives enormous beans but yields terribly; Pacas gives a short, dense-plantable tree with Bourbon cup quality. Pacamara is the attempt to keep the bean size without inheriting quite so much of Maragogipe’s fragility. As this wiki’s Typica note puts it, breeders “crossed it into Pacamara to get the bean size without quite so much of the fragility.”
They mostly succeeded on the cup and mostly failed on the farming. Both halves of that sentence are documented below.
To verify
The dates are not settled by any primary document found here. The World Coffee Research entry gives no year at all for when Pacamara was created or released. Secondary sources are consistent but all repeat each other: several trade write-ups say ISIC began the Pacas × Maragogipe work in 1958 and that selection ran “over three decades” (Perfect Daily Grind; Xliii Coffee, both accessed 2026-07-23, cited via the research report only). They then disagree on the release: Monarch Coffee says ISIC “present[ed] it to the world in 1980,” while Roastopedia says commercial release came in the late 1980s (both accessed 2026-07-23, cited via the research report only). An internal release followed by wider distribution would explain both, but no ISIC bulletin was located to settle it. Do not state 1958 or 1980 as facts.
What the plant is like
Every figure below is from the World Coffee Research entry for Pacamara (accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch).
| Trait | Pacamara |
|---|---|
| Genetic group | Bourbon–Typica related |
| Stature | Dwarf / compact |
| Leaf tip colour | Green or bronze |
| Bean size | Very large |
| Yield potential | Low |
| Nutrition requirement | Medium |
| Optimal altitude | Above 1,300 m at 5–15° latitude; above 1,000 m beyond 15° |
| Coffee leaf rust | Very high susceptibility |
| Ojo de Gallo (Mycena citricolor) | Highly susceptible |
| Coffee berry disease | Susceptible |
| Nematodes | Susceptible |
| Quality potential at high altitude | Exceptional |
| Ownership | Public variety |
Read that table as a single trade-off. “Exceptional” is the top rung of World Coffee Research’s quality scale — the same rating Geisha holds, and a rung above the “Very Good” given to Bourbon. Everything else on the list is a liability. It yields low. It catches rust badly. It catches Ojo de Gallo — “rooster’s eye,” a fungus that punches pale circular holes in the leaves and thrives in the cool, wet, shaded high-altitude conditions Pacamara needs for its cup — worse than most. And it wants to be above 1,300 m, which is precisely where those conditions live.
So the variety only pays at the altitude where it is sickest. That is the whole economics of Pacamara in one line.
The bigger problem: it does not breed true
World Coffee Research states it plainly: “Pacamara is not homogeneous; plants are not stable from one generation to the next” (same source, confirmed via WebFetch).
This is the part that matters most to a farmer and is least visible to a drinker. A grower who saves seed from a Pacamara block does not reliably get Pacamara back — offspring drift back toward the Pacas and Maragogipe parents, so a field planted from farm-saved seed ends up a mix of plant types with mixed bean sizes and mixed ripening. Keeping a Pacamara block true means buying certified seed rather than saving your own.
It is the same instability this wiki records for T5296 in the Sarchimor family — an incompletely fixed line released anyway because what it did well, it did very well.
What it actually wins
This is where Pacamara stops being a promising pedigree and becomes a documented champion. World Coffee Research says Pacamara “frequently dominates Cup of Excellence competitions” in El Salvador. The Alliance for Coffee Excellence’s own published results — primary records — back that up across three consecutive years.
2023 — Pacamara took first place outright.
| Rank | Farm | Producer | Score | Auction price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1A | Mileydi | Norelvia Angelica Elias de Diaz | 91.82 | $59.90/lb |
| 1B | Mileydi | Norelvia Angelica Elias de Diaz | 91.82 | $58.60/lb |
| 3A | San Luis de los Recuerdos | Roberto Samuel Ulloa Rusconi | 90.05 | $20.10/lb |
| 3B | San Luis de los Recuerdos | Roberto Samuel Ulloa Rusconi | 90.05 | $19.00/lb |
| 4 | La Montaña | Francisco Alexander Ochoa Romero | 89.89 | $15.30/lb |
| 5 | La Arada | Cristobal Cartagena Santamaria | 89.89 | $9.15/lb |
The top-scoring coffee in the entire 2023 El Salvador competition was a Pacamara, and it beat a Geisha into second place (ACE — El Salvador 2023, accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch). As with the Cup of Excellence elsewhere, “1A” and “1B” are the same coffee split into two auction lots that sold separately.
2024 — Pacamara won the washed category and filled it.
| Category | Rank | Farm | Producer | Score | Auction price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Washed + Honey | 1A | La Bendicion | Ismael Recinos Flores | 92.00 | $31.60/lb |
| Washed + Honey | 1B | La Bendicion | Ismael Recinos Flores | 92.00 | $30.90/lb |
| Washed + Honey | 3 | Finca El Portezuelo | Rolando Melvi Huezo Escobar | 90.09 | $13.50/lb |
| Washed + Honey | 4 | La Montaña | Francisco Alexander Ochoa Romero | 89.50 | $13.20/lb |
| Washed + Honey | 5 | San Antonio de Alejandria | Jose Elias Escobar Romero | 89.18 | $10.30/lb |
| Washed + Honey | 6 | San Jose | Terra Unlimited | 88.05 | $10.60/lb |
| Natural | 4 | Don Octavio | Jose Octavio Umaña Valdivieso | 89.34 | $12.80/lb |
| Natural | 5 | Los Naranjos | David Velasquez Gomez | 88.95 | $10.00/lb |
| Experimental | 3 | Los Pirineos | Agricafe | 90.45 | $9.60/lb |
| Experimental | 5 | La Perla | Walter Vladimir Pineda Rodriguez | 88.68 | $9.50/lb |
| Experimental | 8 | Puerto Arturo | Karla Patricia Quiros | 88.20 | $10.10/lb |
| Experimental | 9 | El Manantial | Noe Aquiles Chacon Murcia | 88.07 | $9.00/lb |
All rows from ACE — El Salvador 2024 (accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch). Pacamara held the top score of the whole competition at 92.00, and took ranks 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6 of the washed and honey category — five of the top six. It also appeared inside two blended lots: the Experimental winner Las Brumas (Juan Jose Ernesto Menendez Arguello) was 60% Bourbon / 40% Pacamara, scored 91.09 and sold at $55.00/lb, and Holanda placed 9th in Naturals with a 50/50 Pacamara-and-Anacafé blend.
2025 — first place in two of three categories.
| Category | Rank | Farm | Score | Auction price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Washed + Honey | 1A | Santa Rosa | 90.93 | $41.20/lb |
| Washed + Honey | 1B | Santa Rosa | 90.93 | $42.10/lb |
| Washed + Honey | 2 | Los Morales | 90.57 | $19.10/lb |
| Washed + Honey | 6 | Finca El Pezote | 87.14 | $15.60/lb |
| Washed + Honey | 8 | Finca El Durazno | 87.02 | $16.40/lb |
| Natural | 4 | El Angel (Pacamara Amarillo) | 89.21 | $16.50/lb |
| Natural | 10 | El Izotal | 87.50 | $20.10/lb |
| Natural | 12 | El Cerro | 87.50 | $15.30/lb |
| Experimental | 1A | Las Duanas | 90.18 | $17.90/lb |
| Experimental | 1B | Las Duanas | 90.18 | $17.90/lb |
| Experimental | 2 | Las Duanas | 89.55 | $15.20/lb |
| Experimental | 3 | Finca El Portezuelo | 89.30 | $18.30/lb |
| Experimental | 5 | Finca El Portezuelo | 88.14 | $15.20/lb |
From ACE — El Salvador 2025 (accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch). Pacamara took first in Washed + Honey and first in Experimental. The 2025 table also records a Pacamara Amarillo — a yellow-cherry form of the variety — placing 4th in Naturals.
Three years, three separate national auctions, and Pacamara holds the top score in two of them and category wins in all three. That is a far stronger evidence base than exists for most varieties on this wiki, and it comes from the competition organiser’s own published results rather than from marketing copy.
Two honest caveats. The highest price in these auctions usually goes to a Geisha, not a Pacamara — El Salvador’s 2024 auction peaked at $122.00/lb for a natural Geisha from Los Morales, roughly four times what the 92-point Pacamara fetched. And these are national competitions in the one country where Pacamara is planted most heavily, so it is competing at home.
To verify
The flavour descriptions are trade prose, not data. Perfect Daily Grind describes complex intense aromas, medium-to-dense body, creamy texture and elegant acidity, ranging from chocolate and butterscotch to citrus, red berries and stone fruit; The Basic Barista reports that early washed lots were clean and savoury, “akin to jalapeño pepper jelly,” while naturals and anaerobic naturals show more sweetness; Femobook reports floral notes and chocolate sweetness (all accessed 2026-07-23, cited via the research report only). None of these is cupping data. The only defensible numbers on this page are the Cup of Excellence scores above and World Coffee Research’s “Exceptional” quality rating.
Where it grows
World Coffee Research puts Pacamara primarily in El Salvador, and that is where the competition record sits. Secondary trade sources add plantings in Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Peru, and place the Salvadoran concentration in the Apaneca-Ilamatepec and Alotepec-Metapán growing regions (Roastopedia; Xliii Coffee, both accessed 2026-07-23, cited via the research report only) — those regional details are single-sourced and should be treated as such.
Pacamara is a public variety. Nothing in the World Coffee Research entry indicates a protected cultivar or restricted planting rights, and it was produced by a national research institute for national use, which is the normal route to public status.
Why it matters
Pacamara is the clearest example in the catalogue of a deliberately bred variety that competes with the heirlooms on their own ground. Most of this wiki’s bred varieties were made for survival, not flavour — the Catimor and Sarchimor families traded cup quality for rust resistance, and Catimor traded away more than it got back. Pacamara went the other direction entirely: it has essentially no disease resistance, it yields low, it will not breed true, and it wins.
It also punctures a comfortable story. “Bred varieties cup flat, heirlooms cup well” is the shorthand most drinkers carry, and Pacamara — a 1950s-era institutional cross with a 92.00-point Cup of Excellence lot to its name — is the counter-example. The variable that actually predicts cup quality here is not whether a plant was bred, but whether it was bred for cup quality and grown high enough to express it.
Related
- Pacas — the dwarf Bourbon mutation that is the Salvadoran parent
- Maragogipe — the giant-bean Typica mutation that is the Brazilian parent
- Bourbon · Typica — the two founding lineages Pacamara sits between
- Anacafe 14 — the Guatemalan variety bred from (Timor Hybrid × Caturra) × Pacamara
- Pacamara Amarillo — the yellow-cherry form that placed at the 2025 El Salvador auction
- Geisha — the variety it shares an “Exceptional” quality rating with, and usually loses to on price
- Cup of Excellence · Alliance for Coffee Excellence — the competition and the body whose published results are cited above
- Cup of Excellence records by country — where the El Salvador auction sits against the rest
- World Coffee Research — keeper of the variety catalogue every agronomic figure here comes from
- Coffee leaf rust — the disease it has almost no defence against
- Catimor · Sarchimor — the bred families that made the opposite trade
- Cupping · Coffee scoring — how the scores above are produced
- Natural process · Honey process · Anaerobic fermentation — the processing categories the auction tables are split by
Official links
- Official site — World Coffee Research variety record: Pacamara
- Official site — World Coffee Research variety catalogue
- Official site — Alliance for Coffee Excellence, Cup of Excellence results archive
The breeding institute itself has no reachable official presence. ISIC was folded into El Salvador’s later coffee research bodies, and both procafe.com.sv and csc.gob.sv failed to load when checked on 2026-07-23 (DNS failure and an expired certificate respectively). Treat the World Coffee Research record as the authoritative public entry for the variety.
Sources
- World Coffee Research — Pacamara — accessed 2026-07-23 (confirmed via WebFetch)
- Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Cup of Excellence El Salvador 2023 results — accessed 2026-07-23 (confirmed via WebFetch)
- Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Cup of Excellence El Salvador 2024 results — accessed 2026-07-23 (confirmed via WebFetch)
- Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Cup of Excellence El Salvador 2025 results — accessed 2026-07-23 (confirmed via WebFetch)
- Perfect Daily Grind — Interview: What’s So Special About Pacamara? — accessed 2026-07-23 (cited via the research report only)
- Roastopedia — Pacamara Coffee: Origin, Genetics & Cup Profile — accessed 2026-07-23 (cited via the research report only)
- Xliii Coffee — Pacamara Coffee: The superior result of 30 years of breeding innovation — accessed 2026-07-23 (cited via the research report only)
- Monarch Coffee — The Majestic Pacamara — accessed 2026-07-23 (cited via the research report only)
- The Basic Barista — What is Pacamara Coffee Bean? — accessed 2026-07-23 (cited via the research report only)
- Femobook — Pacamara Coffee: Flavor Profile, Origin & Growing Regions — accessed 2026-07-23 (cited via the research report only)