Panama Coffee Overview

Regional Quality

Panama coffees from higher altitudes are brightly toned, with clean fruitedIn some coffee taster’s lexicon, “fruity” means the coffee is tainted with fruit, and “fruited” means a coffee is graced by positive fruit notes. We don’t exactly see… notes and sometimes floral aromatics. Lesser Panama coffees are quite different, and had been a staple of higher-end commercial roasters and lower-end specialty roasters. Ineed there are still many lower-grown Panamas but in all parts of the country, an influx of land investment has lessened the acreage planted in coffee.

Generally the better coffees come from the Boquete and Volcan coffees from the Chirqui district, ones from small family-owned farms that produce the unique coffees. They employ N’gobe Indians for the picking season, who will come to the coffee farms to work under some of the better wage standards and labor laws in Central America, I’m told.

Panama Has Changed Greatly in Recent Years

As investment money came in and the expat/retiree population boomed, it affected the coffee sector in several ways. Farms were sold to foreign investors from ColombiaColombian coffee is highly marketed and widely available in the US. They have been largely successful at equating the name Colombian Coffee with “Good” Coffee. This is half-true…., Venezuela and North America. Land values skyrocketed as retirees from the US sought the lower cost of living, warmer climate and the beauty of the Chirqui area. Conveniences abounded: big box stores nearby in the town of David, the prospect of having a fancy home with a maid and a gardener, and fixed incomes covering medical care to a greater extent, with top doctors in Panama City.

It is no longer the place I visited over a decade ago, and the pressure on labor and land values have made coffee farming even more difficult. And somehow producing good, clean, wet-processed coffee was not enough. Farmers chasing the “Gesha rainbow” have tried all kinds of varietals and processes to attract more attention to their coffee, and they look for prices of 5-20 times that of a solid wet-processed coffee.

In this spasm of competition and diverging ideas of what a “good” coffee is, I think there has been some tarnishing of the Panama star. But great coffee continues to be produced in Panama by some of the most knowledgeable farmers in Central America. Many have the advantage of strong US contacts, family in the States, US university education and flawless English. One wishes they could share their knowledge with other coffee farmers in Central America who lack these advantages.

For some rather dated background material on Panama coffees, go can way back to the 2002 Panama CuppingCupping is a method of tasting coffee by steeping grounds in separate cups for discrete amounts of ground coffee, to reveal good flavors and defects to their fullest…. Competition; also see my slide show of the 2003 cupping. We have a page about the #1 2004 coffee, Jaramillo Especial, and a page about the 2004 Cupping. And the January 2006 crop visit to check our small lot coffee and visit the Gesha trees at HaciendaHacienda is used to imply an Estate that has a full processing facility (wet mill): Sometimes the term Hacienda is used to imply an Estate, which would mean… La Esmeralda. Also see my April 2006 Best of Panama competition trip.