LA LEYENDA

El Salto is the cool high ground above Boquete, on the road that climbs toward the top of Volcán Barú, Panama's highest mountain. Temperatures here run between 13 and 22 °C. The Suárez family's coffee roots in Boquete go back to 1900, when Abdeliat Suadi arrived from Bethlehem and the locals renamed him Domingo Suárez. In 1948 his youngest son Vidal and Vidal's wife Eira Gutiérrez de Suárez started their own farm in El Salto. Their first plantation was Camiseta, planted with Typica, and over the years they bought neighbouring land until they were among the five largest producers in Boquete. Today two of their six children, Carlos and Laura Suárez, run the farms as Grupo Vicala under the El Salto Premium Coffee name, across Camiseta, Los Limones and Doña Eira, between 1500 and 1780 masl. Among other varieties they grow Typica, Yellow Catuai, Laurina and Geisha. Our lots come from Camiseta at 1780 masl. Every pick is floated and sorted by hand, dried slowly in the shade on African beds with the mountain breeze, and finished in a static dryer at low heat.

Laurina is one of the rare coffees with a real island story. In the early 1800s a plantation manager named Leroy, working for Auguste Pajot in Sainte Marie on the island of Bourbon, noticed trees that looked nothing like the rest. They were small and shaped like a pyramid, with short dark leaves and narrow, pointed beans. The locals called it Bourbon Pointu, and planting spread across the island after cyclones and drought destroyed the old coffee in 1806 and 1807. The same quirk that makes the plant so compact also leaves it with around 0.6 percent caffeine, about half of a typical arabica. That is lovely in the cup and hard in the field, because with so little caffeine the tree has less defence against insects, and it yields very little. When sugar cane took over the island in the second half of the 19th century, Laurina slowly disappeared, and after the Second World War only a few trees survived in Creole gardens. In 2002 the Réunion region and CIRAD set out to save it, and since then a handful of farms in Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Panama have taken it up as well. For us it is one of the most elegant coffees there is, quiet and sweet, with a creamy texture and almost no bitterness.

The natural process is the oldest way of preparing coffee, dating back to the earliest days of the crop in Ethiopia and Yemen. The whole cherry is dried intact, with the skin, pulp, and sticky mucilage all left on the bean, so as the fruit slowly dries it feeds its sugars and aromas straight into the seed. Getting it right takes patience and constant attention, as the cherries have to be turned regularly on raised beds over many days to dry evenly and avoid faults. Done well, the natural process gives coffees their heavy body, deep berry and jam fruit, and big, wine like sweetness.