This is always one of my favourite coffees of the year. It’s packed with tropical fruits, it’s juicy and has a great creamy body to bring it all together. This coffee is very flavorful, so if you’re into that, then give it a go. It’s a natural Yellow Maragogype from one of the most renowned coffee producers in Panama - the Hartmanns.
Marago is a natural mutation of Typica and it’s known for being a very expressive coffee variety, although due to its unusually large size, it’s a harder variety to process well. Historically this coffee is huge and easy to notice on a cupping table, but this year the coffee has reached a new level. In 2020, the Hartmanns decided to plant yellow Maragogype in their upper farm: Ojo de Agua. The expectation was always that it would be better, as coffee usually improves with elevation, but the coffee really impressed me beyond my expectations. It’s big, bold, wild but retains this classy element that truly showcases the terroir of Maragogype.
A bit more about the family! The Hartman family is made up of four brothers and a sister, their spouses and their grand or their children. Their grandfather Alois Strasil Hartmann first mountaineered through the Santa Clara region in the late 1800s. He found a remote, beautiful, fertile, forest enclosed region that would later become Finca Hartmann. Alois’ son, Ratibor “Chico” Hartmann was responsible for growing the plantation and establishing Finca Hartmann as a coffee farm. Chico’s children now run the farm.
Chico passed in 2016, but years before his passing, he sat his Children down and gave them two options on how to move forward. Option one was the traditional way of dividing the land up by five and each sibling doing their own independent thing. Option two was to keep the land intact and have them work as a team, each focusing on their own strength. They chose…drumroll… option two.
OK, so back to this coffee. It’s grown at 1500m in a forest surrounded farm in the middle of the Santa Clara mountains in Panama. What do the Hartmanns do that’s so unique?
First, the coffee plants. It’s no secret that Maragogype thrives in the Hartmann farm. Second, they've taken these plants and they've given them lots of care and nurture. When I walk through the farm, the trees are some of the happiest and healthiest I've seen. Then when it's time to pick, they're super punctual. Everyday during the harvest, they find the plot of land that has the most ripe cherry and pick that day.
And then in the processing, this is where this coffee begins to shine. The coffee was naturally processed, but rather than leaving the drying to chance, the Hartmanns dried it by dehydration in their custom built dark rooms. This is by far and away the best way to dry coffee.
The result of all this hard work is a coffee that makes your eyes pop and question what just happened in your mouth (in a good way).
