Pacas

Pacas is a naturally short version of Bourbon. One gene changed in a Bourbon field in El Salvador, the tree stopped growing tall, and Salvadoran farmers kept it — because a short tree can be planted closer together and picked without a ladder.¹²

It is the same accident that produced Caturra in Brazil and Villa Sarchi in Costa Rica. World Coffee Research names all three in one breath: “Pacas is a natural mutation of Bourbon, similar to Caturra in Brazil and Villa Sarchi in Costa Rica… a single-gene mutation that causes the plant to grow smaller (Dwarf/Compactism). This is it’s chief virtue: the plant’s small size leads to higher potential yields and the possibility of placing plants closer together to increase total fruit production on a farm”.³

Two things make Pacas matter beyond being a third example of the same mutation. It is about a quarter of everything El Salvador grows, and it is one half of Pacamara — the deliberately bred giant-bean variety that dominates the Salvadoran Cup of Excellence.

Where it came from

World Coffee Research states it directly: the variety “was discovered in 1949 on a farm owned by the Pacas family in the Santa Ana region of El Salvador. In 1960, the Salvadoran Institute for Coffee Research (ISIC) began a program of pedigree selection (selection of individual plants through successive generations) for Pacas”.

Pedigree selection is worth unpacking, because it is the step that turns a lucky tree into a plantable variety. A single mutant plant is one plant. Taking its seed, growing it out, keeping only the offspring that stayed short and cupped well, and repeating that for generations is how you get a population that reliably breeds true. Pacas took eleven years to go from found to formally worked on, and that 1960 date is a breeding start, not a discovery — the same distinction this wiki draws for Caturra, where 1937 is often misreported as the discovery year.

Before it was Pacas, though, it was a case of mistaken identity — and that is the reason the variety ended up carrying a surname rather than a farm name or a botanical one. Mercanta’s account of the family says that when the odd tree turned up, “the Pacas family believed this to be the famed ‘Híbrido San Ramón Borbón’” — an already-named Bourbon type in circulation at the time — and that “after careful observation, it was discovered that this was a completely new variety.”⁴ Nothing on record fitted it, so it was named after the people whose field it grew in. This wiki’s Pacas family note tells the same story from the family’s side.

From El Salvador it went next door. Pacas “is also grown in Honduras, where it was introduced by IHCAFE in 1974” — IHCAFE being the Honduran national coffee institute. Those two countries are the only ones the catalogue names anywhere, which is worth knowing before reading the wider claims made for it.³

To verify

How far Pacas actually spread is a trade claim, not a catalogue one. Café Pacas’s own producer profile and the German importer Cumpa both say Pacas became popular with growers across most Central American countries and into parts of South America.⁵⁶ World Coffee Research names only El Salvador and Honduras, and the 1974 Honduran introduction is the only transfer it dates.³ The wider spread is plausible — this is a public variety with no planting restrictions, and its Costa Rican and Brazilian twins travelled the same way — but no country list beyond those two is documented here, and no national planting figure for any third country was found.

To verify

The discovery date is a four-way mess, and the wiki takes 1949 because World Coffee Research does. The other versions in circulation:

• 1956, with the finder named as Fernando Alberto Pacas Figueroa.⁷
• The 1960s, “stumbled upon by the Pacas family along the Apaneca-Ilamatepec mountain range,” with a separate note that a new, high-yielding, differently shaped tree had already been observed on the San Rafael farm in the 1930s.⁴
• The 1940s, discovered by the great-grandfather of producer Maria Pacas.⁵

A first sighting in the 1930s, formal recognition around 1949, and institutional selection from 1960 would reconcile most of this, but no source actually makes that argument — it is a guess, and it is written here as one. Note also that World Coffee Research says only “a farm owned by the Pacas family”; the specific naming of Finca San Rafael comes from trade sources,⁸ not the catalogue — though a competition document now supports it: ACE’s farm file for Santa Sofía states that the property “was once part of San Rafael farm, where the Pacas coffee variety naturally mutated from Bourbón.”⁹ That is a primary source for the place; it still gives no date and names no person.

To verify

Nobody agrees on the first name of the man it is named after. One trade source says the farm owner was Don Francisco Pacas and then immediately concedes that “according to another version, his name was Fernando”;¹⁰ Perfect Daily Grind gives Fernando Alberto Pacas Figueroa. The catalogue names no individual at all. Don’t attach a given name to this variety.

To verify

The University of Florida connection is trade-sourced only. Two independent trade sources credit the formal scientific identification of Pacas as a new Bourbon mutant to American researchers, and both were read directly for this note. Mercanta names Dr. William Cowgill of the University of Florida: the variety was “named Pacas thanks to observations by Dr. William Cowgill from the University of Florida.”⁴ Perfect Daily Grind attributes the finding itself to the same institution: “The Pacas is a natural mutation of the Bourbon varietal, as determined by research conducted by scientists of the University of Florida.”⁷ So the claim is genuinely two-sourced and neither is quoting the other — but no underlying paper, herbarium record or University of Florida page was located, and World Coffee Research’s catalogue entry mentions neither Cowgill nor the university anywhere.³ Treat Cowgill as a well-repeated attribution, not a documented one.

What the plant is like

Every figure below is from the World Coffee Research variety catalogue entry for Pacas.

Trait	Pacas
Genetic group	Bourbon–Typica group (Bourbon related)
Breeder	Instituto Salvadoreño de Investigaciones del Café (ISIC)
Stature	Dwarf / compact
Leaf tip colour	Green
Bean size	Average
Yield potential	Medium
Nutrition requirement	Medium
First production	Year 3 after planting
Planting density	5,000–6,000 plants/ha (single-stem pruning)
Ripening	Average
Cherry-to-green-bean outturn	Average
Optimal altitude	Above 1,600 m within 5° of the equator; above 1,300 m at 5–15° latitude; above 1,000 m beyond 15°
Coffee leaf rust	Low resistance / susceptible
Nematodes	Susceptible
Coffee berry disease	Susceptible
Quality potential at high altitude	Good

Read that table next to Caturra’s and the resemblance is almost eerie: same dwarf stature, same 5,000–6,000 plants per hectare, same year-three first crop, same average bean, same rust problem, same “Good” quality rating. The one real difference is nutrition requirement — Caturra is rated high, Pacas medium. Packed at the same density, Pacas is the less hungry tree, which matters most on farms that can’t spend freely on fertiliser.

The rust line is the one that costs money. Low resistance to Coffee leaf rust is what Pacas inherited from Bourbon along with the sweetness, and it is the reason Salvadoran and Honduran farms lost so heavily when rust swept Central America from around 2008. Trade sources phrase it more starkly than the catalogue does — “vulnerable to all major coffee diseases”¹¹ — which is consistent with the catalogue rating three separate diseases as susceptible.

One practical note on the altitude row. El Salvador sits at roughly 14° north, so the middle band applies: the catalogue’s threshold for Salvadoran Pacas is above 1,300 m.

To verify

A commonly quoted altitude band contradicts the catalogue. One roaster guide gives Pacas an “optimal altitude” of 1,000–1,700 m, and another puts its best expression around 5,200 ft (≈1,585 m), dropping toward ~3,200 ft (≈975 m) further from the equator — both cited via the research report only. World Coffee Research publishes no single band; it publishes a floor that rises as you approach the equator. A ceiling of 1,700 m is not something the catalogue says at all. The same source also claims Pacas “is able to survive both a drop in temperature and heat and even a lack of water”; no agronomic study supporting that drought and heat tolerance was found, and the catalogue makes no such claim.

A quarter of El Salvador

The single most-quoted number about Pacas turns out to be the one that holds up. Pacas “is still widely grown in the country; it accounts for about 25% of the country’s coffee production”. Trade sources repeat the figure,¹² but the catalogue is where it originates, and that is a technical reference rather than marketing copy.

Note what kind of number it is: a share of production, not a national statistic from a coffee board. It is the industry’s working estimate, and no Salvadoran government census confirming it was located here.

Seed stock, the catalogue adds, “is available from Procafe” — the Salvadoran coffee foundation that succeeded ISIC. As recorded on this wiki’s Pacamara note, Procafe’s own domain failed to resolve, so that seed channel could not be verified as currently operating.

What it tastes like

The formal answer is one word. World Coffee Research rates Pacas’s quality potential at high altitude as “Good” — the same rung it gives Caturra, one below the “Very Good” it gives Bourbon, and two below the “Exceptional” it gives Geisha and Pacamara. On a wiki full of trophy varieties, Pacas is rated a workhorse.

That rating is worth sitting with, because it explains the variety’s whole commercial position. Pacas is not what a Salvadoran farm enters in a competition; it is what a Salvadoran farm grows. The competition block is Pacamara or Geisha. Pacas is the quarter of the crop underneath.

To verify

There are no cupping scores for Pacas here, and the flavour notes are trade prose. Roaster descriptions run to “balanced, medium body, gentle acidity, caramel and chocolate sweetness, stone fruit, clean finish” and “balanced acidity and bitterness, very slight sweetness and hints of cocoa” — both cited via this note’s research brief only. No SCA, CQI or Cup of Excellence score for any Pacas lot was found, and none should be invented. The only defensible sensory statement on this page is the catalogue’s “Good.”

It does not show up at auction

This is a genuine finding rather than a gap, and it is worth stating plainly: Pacas is absent from El Salvador’s Cup of Excellence results.

The Alliance for Coffee Excellence’s published results for El Salvador 2023, 2024 and 2025 were each checked for any lot listing Pacas — alone or inside a blend — and there are none in any of the three years.¹³¹⁴¹⁵ The variety fields in those tables are full of Pacamara, Geisha, Kenya SL28, Bourbon and blends. Its own parent variety is missing.

That is three consecutive years of one national competition, not a global search, so read the scope honestly. But it is the right competition to check — El Salvador is where a quarter of the crop is Pacas — and the absence is consistent across all three. Pacas is a production variety, not an auction variety. Its route to the top of the score sheet runs through its child.

Absent from auctions is not the same as absent from the specialty trade, though, and the difference is worth holding onto. Pacas is still bought and sold under its own name: one US green-coffee importer lists an “El Salvador Pacas Estate™ Natural Process” green lot from the Pacas family’s Finca La Esperanza, which at least establishes that single-variety, carefully processed Pacas reaches export buyers.¹⁶ What that listing does not carry is the thing an auction lot always carries — a score, a hammer price and a named jury. That is exactly the gap this section is describing.

Its most important descendant

Pacas is one of the two parents of Pacamara, crossed with Maragogipe — the giant-bean Typica mutation from Brazil — by ISIC. World Coffee Research records the Pacamara parentage as “Pacas x Maragogipe” and places the result in the Bourbon–Typica group, which is exactly what a Bourbon mutant crossed with a Typica mutant should produce (see Pacamara, where the record is set out in full).¹⁷

What Pacas contributed to that cross is legible in the table above: a short, densely plantable tree with Bourbon cup quality behind it. Maragogipe supplied the enormous bean and a terrible yield. Pacamara is the attempt to keep the first without inheriting all of the second — and it is why a variety rated merely “Good” sits behind a variety rated “Exceptional.”

There is a footnote to that. Pacamara does not breed true, and one of the two things its offspring drift back toward is Pacas. A farmer saving Pacamara seed can end up with something closer to the short Salvadoran parent than to the giant-bean hybrid they planted.

Why it matters

Pacas is the clearest case in this wiki of a variety that is economically enormous and reputationally invisible. It feeds a quarter of a national crop and has no competition record. It is rated “Good” and has never been fashionable. Almost everything written about it in the trade is really about its child.

It also completes an argument the Bourbon note starts. Bourbon threw the same dwarfing mutation three separate times, in three separate countries, and every time a farming community grabbed it within a generation — Caturra in Brazil, Pacas in El Salvador, Villa Sarchi in Costa Rica. That is not coincidence about coffee genetics; it is a statement about what farmers wanted. Given the same accident three times, they made the same choice three times: take the short tree, plant it tight, accept the rust.

Related

• El Salvador — the origin it was found in, and where it is about a quarter of the crop
• Bourbon — the parent it is a dwarf mutation of
• Caturra · Villa Sarchi — the same single-gene dwarfing mutation, found independently in Brazil and Costa Rica
• Instituto Salvadoreño de Investigaciones del Café — the state institute that ran its pedigree selection from 1960, now defunct
• IHCAFE — the Honduran institute that introduced it to the only other country the catalogue names, in 1974
• Pacamara — the ISIC cross of Pacas × Maragogipe, and the reason most people have heard the name
• Maragogipe — the giant-bean Typica mutation on the other side of that cross
• Pacas family — the Salvadoran growers whose farm it was found on and who it is named after
• Typica — the other founding lineage, reached through Pacamara
• Coffee leaf rust — the disease it has little defence against
• World Coffee Research — keeper of the catalogue every agronomic figure here comes from
• Cup of Excellence · Alliance for Coffee Excellence — the competition whose three most recent Salvadoran results contain no Pacas lot
• Geisha — what Salvadoran farms enter instead
• Cupping · Coffee scoring — how a cup rating like “Good” gets produced
• Catimor · Sarchimor — the bred families built to fix the rust weakness Pacas still carries

Official links

• Official site — World Coffee Research variety record: Pacas
• Official site — Café Pacas — the Salvadoran family business descended from the growers the variety is named after

The breeding institute has no reachable official presence. ISIC was folded into El Salvador’s later coffee bodies, and both procafe.com.sv and csc.gob.sv failed to load when checked (a DNS failure and an expired certificate respectively — see Pacamara). Treat the World Coffee Research record as the authoritative public entry for the variety.

Footnotes

1. Café Pacas — official site ↩

2. Sweet Maria’s coffee library — Pacas ↩

3. World Coffee Research — Pacas ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

4. Mercanta — Delving into Café Pacas, El Salvador ↩ ↩² ↩³

5. Typica — Love is Always Close By: Café Pacas ↩ ↩²

6. Cumpa — Pacas and Pacamara: El Salvador’s heritage lives on — cited via this note’s research brief only ↩

7. Perfect Daily Grind — Interview: What’s So Special About Pacamara? ↩ ↩²

8. Ozone Coffee — Pacas coffee varietal: origins, flavour and growing guide ↩

9. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — farm file, Santa Sofía / Pacvil, S.A. de C.V., El Salvador 2006 — confirmed via WebFetch ↩

10. BrewLogy — Pacas coffee beans: origin story and taste profile ↩

11. Proud Mary Coffee — Pacas coffee variety ↩

12. Xliii Coffee — Pacas coffee variety: the advantage of a single-gene Bourbon mutation ↩

13. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Cup of Excellence El Salvador 2023 results ↩

14. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Cup of Excellence El Salvador 2024 results ↩

15. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Cup of Excellence El Salvador 2025 results ↩

16. Café Kreyol — Green (unroasted) El Salvador Pacas Estate™ Natural Process — a retailer product listing, cited via this note’s research brief only ↩

17. World Coffee Research — Pacamara ↩