[145] Peru - Elider Cruz's Pacamara [CROP 25/26 ARCHIVE]

We haven't bought/featured a huge amount of Pacamara in our time operating as a roastery. For a long time we subscribed to an outdated view of how to roast them - so they massively suffered at the first hurdle, with poor sample roasts negating them from the outset from a chance to shine.
The second is that.. quite a few of them, even roasted quite nicely, just aren't our cup of tea - they can often be quite bell pepper/alium forward.

Safe to say this lot is quite the opposite, honestly we think you can smell how nice the acidity is both off the green coffee + off the roasted lot - it's hard to describe but it's there. We've found ourselves huffing both during the QC process getting to the point of releasing this lot. Intoxicating

With the stresses of growing at such extreme altitudes (2400 MASL+), this Pacamara is super dense and doesn't quite reach the maximal size the genetics can express with at lower, warmer climbs, although that could also be partially down to the mild instability inherent in the variety - pure speculation. What we can say is that the altitude and careful processing have produced something that we think is a superlative lot that is outrageously good value and delicious, and we really should have bought more than we did - get it while it's here.

Brew Guide:

Best Brewed with: Filter

Lightest Roaster Influence: This coffee is SUPER dense with very clean processing, but it IS still a Pacamara. While we're not slowing things down absolute heaps like the old way of thinking, it is still slightly slower compared to Elzer's Caturra - with an extended development time for a lower end temperature. Acidity-forward and joocy

Best Rested: 4 weeks

Filter: 62g/L & 96°C, with rest we like to move down to 91°C/60g/L

Espresso: Turbo shots + 3 weeks rest. 18g/48g+ & 18s

We’re tasting: Heady + rich aromatics - we find cherry, raspberry & blackcurrant leaf. In the cup it's really vibrant - we're finding blackcurrant jam, full-sugar vanilla cola (which with the acidity, gives an almost effervescent element to the body), golden kiwi and rambutan. As it cools becoming more like gooseberry coulis, with a white chocolate sweetness. Zingy and absolutely bursting with energy 

Traceability

The Story:

We're almost at the end of our 25/26 Peru selections and - what a season it's been. A triple whammy of releases sees 3 stunners at once - Yulisa's competition winning Gesha, Elzer's 2400 MASL Trad Washed Caturra, and from the same region, Elider's Pacamara - another outrageously high grown lot.

Elider's entry into coffee came through a community bio-garden initiative run by the municipality of Sallique around 2008, which distributed young plants to local families as part of a broader agroecological programme. Motivated by this program, he started planting coffee at his farm, Finca El Chamanal, which sits above the caserío of Buenos Aires in the Sallique district. Above the farm, the páramo ecosystem feeds the alpine aquifer systems that supply water to the communities and farmland below.

We booked out the entirety of Elider's Caturra lot, processed with a similar technique - and have used it in Facility V14 to great effect. Honestly one of the best coffees we've ever had in Facility and a real treat to serve something like that, we found it added such a sweet apple note to the blend it was unreal. And when we sampled this Pacamara lot it absolutely blew us away as well - super bright, juicy, dense acidity - reminding us not only of tropical fruits but also, rich Kenyan coffee and also somewhat, in a sample cupping, of sumac! that didn't so much show in the production roast but super unique note to find anyway. 

Pacamara is a cultivar known for its gigantic screen size, a cross of Pacas (Bourbon lineage) and Maragogipe (a Typica mutation with famously large beans). Growing at this extreme altitude puts the tree under physiological stress from cooler day and night temperatures, delaying cherry maturation and yielding beans that don’t quite reach the wild sizes we've seen in other Pacamara lots, but equally it's quite famously an unstable variety that can present quite different phenotypic expressions - perhaps one of the reasons it's got such a mixed reputation.