Panama Premium Boquete – Garrido Volcancito Estate – H1 CentroAmericano Natural

Description

Garrido Estate coffees very rarely makes it to the US. Owned and operated by Jose David Garrido Perez and consists of 4 farms including the famed Mama Cata.

Volcancito is his high altitude test farm, where he plays with new strains and processing ideas.  H1 CentroAmericano is a new hybrid strain of Arabica. Very tasty stuff especially with the natural processing.

H1 CentroAmericano is a cross between an Ethiopian land race strain; Rume Sudan, and a more disease resistant arabica strain called T5296. It is meant to pull Ethiopian like attributes with a far less finicky to grow plant than Geisha.

Located in some of the best growing territory in Panama; some of the biggest names in Panama coffee are also located in this prime territory, Hacienda Esmeralda and Elida Estate are neighbors.  Since his coffee is almost always obtained by foreign markets, many in the US have not heard the name Garrido before but it easily competes with the best of the best.

Tasting Notes: Wow, super tasty but you can tell it is something unique. Definitely still a light roast coffee and very high scoring: very floral with higher acidity and a ton of fruitiness. You can see the Ethiopian heritage is how floral this cup gets upfront the addition of all the sweet stone fruit tones combine wonderfully. Where this cup differs from say a Geisha coffee, the darker tones to this cup are almost more Java like, rustic chocolate spice. Mostly at a lighter roast you just get overwhelmed with the fruit and floral but let it cool a bit and you can see the balance with the more rustic chocolate notes, think Ethiopian gr. 3, or Yemen coffee.

Roasting Notes: Similar to the other stellar naturals, a little bit of work to roast this one, two toned and high chaff. Keep it light and error lighter than darker. Our light roast still had a couple of first crack pops happening when we cooled it out and made for a super tasty treat. You can push the roast a bit on this one without burning anything out, a little richer and milder, but half the fun of this cup is the very punchy floral and fruit, so we recommend lighter than darker. Setup is important with these full flavored higher acidity cups, great tasting after 24 hours, but to see it shine, 3-4 days later makes a big difference.