Pacamara Amarillo

Pacamara Amarillo is Pacamara whose fruit ripens yellow instead of red. Amarillo is simply Spanish for yellow, and that is the entire difference the name claims to describe.

It is worth being precise about what kind of name this is. It is not a catalogued variety. World Coffee Research has a full entry for Pacamara — parentage, disease ratings, altitude bands — and that entry says nothing at all about cherry colour, lists no yellow form and gives no synonym for one.¹ The catalogue has no page of its own for Pacamara Amarillo either; the URL returns HTTP 404. What exists instead is a label producers write on entry forms, and it has been written on enough of them that the Alliance for Coffee Excellence’s published results now record it as a variety in three countries.

This is the same situation the Bourbon note describes for Yellow Bourbon and Pink Bourbon — widely traded colour names with no catalogue entry behind them. As the World Coffee Research note on this wiki puts it, a missing entry is information too: it does not make the plant fictional, it means every agronomic figure quoted for it rests on something other than the catalogue.

To verify

No breeder, no release, no registration — nobody has published what Pacamara Amarillo actually is. The research brief behind this note searched for a primary, breeder-level document defining it and found none, concluding that it is most likely “a farm-level or marketing descriptor for yellow-fruiting Pacamara selections” — and labelling that conclusion inference, not documentation. Treat it the same way. There is no named selector, no year, no institute and no seed source in any source consulted here.

Why a yellow Pacamara is unsurprising

Yellow fruit is ordinary in arabica. A coffee cherry ripens from green to a mature colour that depends on the plant, and as this wiki’s Coffee cherry note records, “a notable number of cultivars — including several Arabica varieties — ripen to yellow.” Catuaí and Bourbon both circulate in red and yellow versions for exactly this reason.

Pacamara has a second, sharper reason to throw colour variants. World Coffee Research states flatly that “Pacamara is not homogeneous; plants are not stable from one generation to the next”.¹ The selection work at the Salvadoran institute that made it was never finished, so a Pacamara field planted from farm-saved seed drifts — different plant shapes, different bean sizes, and plausibly different fruit colours. A farmer who spots a yellow-fruiting tree in that drift and propagates it has a yellow Pacamara without anyone having bred one.

To verify

That is a mechanism, not a documented history. Pacamara’s instability is on the record; the claim that the yellow lots came out of that instability is a connection this note is drawing, and no source states it. The alternative — a deliberate colour selection made and named on a single farm, then shared — is equally consistent with the evidence and equally undocumented.

The competition record

This is the part that is genuinely solid. Four lots entered under the exact variety name “Pacamara Amarillo” appear in the Alliance for Coffee Excellence’s published Cup of Excellence results, all confirmed by reading the results pages directly.

	Year	Country	Category	Rank	Farm	Producer	Process	Score	Lot	Price	Buyer
1	2021	Honduras	—	25	Cerro Azul	Cafe Azul Meambar S.A. de C.V.	washed	87.07	not published	$23.90/lb	Takamura Coffee Roasters
2	2025	El Salvador	Natural	4	El Angel	Carlos Alfredo Mendez Florez Cabezas	natural	89.21	941 lb	16.50/lb (15,526.50)	honu 加藤珈琲店
3	2026	Nicaragua	Natural & Honey	12	El Porvenir	Sergio Noé Ortez Ortez	natural	87.72	1,124.36 lb	$15.40/lb	Takamura Coffee Roasters · Shrub Coffee by Marukai
4	2026	El Salvador	Natural	4	Finca La Montaña	Inversiones Geca, S.A. de C.V.	natural	88.45	824.26 lb	$16.50/lb	honu 加藤珈琲店

Rows from ACE’s results for Honduras 2021,² El Salvador 2025,³ Nicaragua 2026⁴ and El Salvador 2026.⁵ The El Salvador 2025 lot came from the Apaneca-Ilamatepec region, the country’s largest growing area and one of the two where this wiki’s Pacamara note places the Salvadoran concentration of the variety.³

Four numbers are worth reading off that table.

It has never won anything. The best placings are two fourth-in-category finishes, at 89.21 and 88.45. Over the same seasons, plain Pacamara took the top score of the entire El Salvador competition twice — 92.00 in 2024 and 90.93 in 2025 — and won two of three categories in 2025. Yellow Pacamara sits in the 87–89 band: comfortably specialty, never the headline. In the 2026 El Salvador auction it was more than three points behind the competition’s best lot at 91.95.⁵

It is a natural-process coffee in practice. Three of the four lots were naturals — cherries dried whole with the fruit still on. Only the earliest, Honduras 2021, was washed. That may be nothing more than fashion in Central American competition entries, but it means almost everything anyone has tasted under this name was made the same way.

Every single lot went to Japan. Takamura Coffee Roasters, honu 加藤珈琲店 (Kato Coffee), Shrub Coffee by Marukai — four lots, four Japanese buyers, no exceptions. See Japan coffee market for why Japanese roasters dominate the buyer columns of these auctions generally; here the concentration is total.

The price does not follow the score. The lowest-scoring lot of the four, Honduras 2021 at 87.07, fetched the highest price at 23.90/lb**, while the highest-scoring one at 89.21 took **16.50. And both El Salvador lots, a year apart and 0.76 points apart, sold to the same buyer at exactly $16.50. That looks less like an auction pricing quality and more like one roaster with a standing interest and a number in mind. Premiumisation is the note on why variety reputation, not score, sets the ceiling in these rooms — and “Pacamara Amarillo” carries no reputation at all yet.

To verify

These four lots are not known to be the same plant. Nothing links Cerro Azul in Honduras, El Angel and Finca La Montaña in El Salvador, and El Porvenir in Nicaragua beyond a shared entry-form label — no seed source, no nursery, no genetic testing. Four farms independently naming their yellow-fruiting Pacamara “Pacamara Amarillo” is exactly what you would expect whether or not they are growing the same selection. Do not treat the table above as the track record of a single variety; treat it as the track record of a name.

To verify

ACE fills in auction figures after results are first published, so older readings go stale. This wiki’s Finca El Porvenir (San Fernando) and Sergio Noé Ortez Ortez notes both recorded the 2026 Nicaraguan lot’s price and buyer as not published, because at the time they were written the page carried no such columns. It now carries both — $15.40/lb, to Takamura and Shrub — and those two notes have been corrected to match.⁴ Any price read off an ACE page in the weeks after a competition should be re-checked before it is quoted.

What is not known about it

Everything an ordinary variety note would contain. There is no separate agronomic data for the yellow form: no altitude band, no yield figure, no disease rating, no tree description that distinguishes it from ordinary Pacamara. There is no cupping data either — the four scores above are the only measured quality numbers attached to the name anywhere in the sources consulted.

To verify

Do not borrow Pacamara’s spec sheet wholesale. It is reasonable to expect a yellow Pacamara to behave roughly like a red one — very large beans, low yield, severe rust susceptibility, exceptional cup potential only when grown high. But that is an assumption from the parent, not a measurement of the yellow form, and Pacamara’s own instability is the reason to be careful about assuming any two Pacamara-derived plants behave alike. Every figure on the Pacamara note is sourced to World Coffee Research’s entry for Pacamara, which does not know this plant exists.

Why it matters

Pacamara Amarillo is a small, clean example of how coffee varieties actually get named. A catalogue entry is written by an institute after years of selection; a lot-sheet name is written by a farmer in a field, and it enters the record the moment a competition prints it. The second route is far faster and produces most of the names on a modern specialty menu — and it produces them with no genetics, no history and no agronomy attached.

The honest position on this one is that a real, physically distinct set of plants almost certainly exists — four farms in three countries did not invent the same yellow cherries — while the entity behind the name remains undefined. That gap between a traded name and a documented plant is the normal state of affairs in specialty coffee, not an exception.

Related

• Pacamara — the parent variety, its ISIC breeding history, its Cup of Excellence dominance and every agronomic figure that exists
• Pacas — the dwarf Bourbon mutation that is half of Pacamara’s parentage
• Instituto Salvadoreño de Investigaciones del Café — the Salvadoran institute that bred Pacamara and never finished selecting it
• Bourbon · Catuaí — the other families that circulate in red and yellow versions, likewise mostly uncatalogued
• Coffee cherry — why a yellow cherry is a ripe one, not an unripe one
• World Coffee Research — the variety catalogue this name is absent from, and what an absence means
• Cup of Excellence · Alliance for Coffee Excellence — the competition and the body publishing every number above
• Cup of Excellence records by country — where these auctions sit against each other
• Finca El Porvenir (San Fernando) · Sergio Noé Ortez Ortez — the Nicaraguan farm and producer behind the 2026 lot
• El Salvador · Honduras · Nicaragua — the three origins the name has appeared in
• Natural process · Washed process — the two processes in the table
• Japan coffee market — where all four lots went
• Premiumisation — why the highest score here did not fetch the highest price
• Cupping · Coffee scoring — how those four numbers were produced
• Coffee leaf rust — the weakness inherited from the parent, assumed rather than measured

Official links

• Official site — World Coffee Research variety catalogue — no entry exists for Pacamara Amarillo; the nearest record is the Pacamara entry
• Official results — Alliance for Coffee Excellence, competition and auction archive — the primary record of all four lots above

There is no official body, breeder page or association for this name, because there is no body that recognises it.

Footnotes

1. World Coffee Research — Pacamara ↩ ↩²

2. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Cup of Excellence Honduras 2021 results and auction ↩

3. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Cup of Excellence El Salvador 2025 results and auction ↩ ↩²

4. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Cup of Excellence Nicaragua 2026 results and auction ↩ ↩²

5. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Cup of Excellence El Salvador 2026 results and auction ↩ ↩²