This is In My Mug coffee number 938, roasted and posted to subscribers on Friday 30th October 2026.
Part candy, part fresh fruit. Tinned peach and strawberry arrive first, soft and syrupy, before the cup turns towards pineapple as it cools. The sweetness hangs around long after each sip, like the last few fruit salad sweets in the bag. A super sweet, properly elegant coffee.
If the farm and the varietal ring a bell, they should. Eight weeks ago we sent you the Natural Yellow Pacamara from Finca Argentina’s San Jorge plot. This is the Washed lot from the same trees, and it’s a very different coffee. It’s also kept our Roasting Team on their toes, so this week we’re taking you inside the roastery in Stafford as well as out to the farm.
Same trees, different cup
Roland was in El Salvador in February, arriving as the harvest at Finca Argentina was drawing to a close. At the Los Ausoles mill with Mauricio Martinez, he cupped through the farm’s fresh lots, and both Yellow Pacamaras were on the table: a Natural and a Washed. Everyone around that table agreed the varietal was tasting terrific this year. We bought both.
Tasting the two side by side is a brilliant lesson in what processing does. In a natural, the whole cherry dries around the bean, and the fruit leaves its fingerprints all over the cup. That’s where IMM 930 got its pear, its miso caramel edge and its gentle funk. Washing takes the fruit away before drying. The cherry is pulped, the sticky layer of mucilage is fermented off and the beans are washed clean. What’s left is the seed’s own character, with nothing layered on top.
And that character is unmistakably Yellow Pacamara. When we’ve cupped red and yellow Pacamara blind against each other, the yellow has leaned towards peach, apricot and tropical fruit with a creamy sweetness, while the red runs more towards citrus. Tinned peach and pineapple, in a clean washed cup, is the variety speaking for itself.
How coffee processing works →
Revisit IMM 930, the Natural Yellow Pacamara →
A Salvadoran coffee, home again
There’s a neat loop in where these trees came from. Pacamara itself is Salvadoran. It was crossed from Pacas and Maragogipe at the Salvadoran Institute for Coffee Research in 1958, then selected over several generations before it reached farmers. The yellow-fruited form appeared decades later as a natural mutation at Finca Limoncillo in Nicaragua, where the Mierisch family nurtured it. The seed for Finca Argentina came from the Mierisch family and Finca Limoncillo, which makes this lot a cousin of the Limoncillo Yellow Pacamaras you may have tasted from us over the years. A Salvadoran invention, transformed in Nicaragua, now growing back in El Salvador.
It has settled in beautifully. Like the Natural, this lot comes from San Jorge, the highest plot on the farm, where the Yellow Pacamara grows alongside the upper reaches of the tablones next door. The team love it for how productive and hardy it’s proved, which isn’t what you’d expect from the same plant back in Nicaragua. Same genetics, different hillside, different behaviour. Hold that thought, because it comes up again in the roaster.
If anywhere can call itself Pacamara country, it’s El Salvador. The variety took first place at the national Cup of Excellence three years running, from 2019 to 2021, with a honey, a natural and a semi-washed lot in turn. Seeing a yellow-fruited version thrive on a farm we’ve known for so long feels like a small part of that story.
Our full guide to the Pacamara varietal →
Roasting a giant
Pacamara beans are enormous, and that changes everything about how they behave in the roaster. The chemistry of roasting is the same as for any other coffee. The physics isn’t.
Start with size. Heat has further to travel to reach the centre of a bean this big, so if you charge in too hard, the outside races ahead of the middle. The result is a two-toned bean: scorched on the surface, underdeveloped at the core, and a cup that tastes of both.
The natural response is to go gently, and that’s where Pacamara sets its second trap. These beans are also relatively low in density compared with a standard Bourbon, let alone a dense Peaberry. That open internal structure lets energy move in quickly, and out again just as fast. As the coffee reaches first crack, it can shed heat rapidly and lose momentum at exactly the point it needs to keep going. Roast too cautiously and it stalls.
So the skill is control rather than caution: enough energy to get to the heart of the bean, managed carefully enough that the outside doesn’t run away with it. Head Roaster Gary puts it rather more memorably. “Don’t be afraid to push your heat. Fear the Reaper, don’t fear the Pacamara!” Timely advice, given the date.
Then there’s the visual trick. Roasted Pacamara often looks lighter than it tastes, so judging it by colour alone will lead you astray. Sound, smell and roast data do the heavy lifting here, telling the team where the roast really is rather than where it appears to be.
None of this adds up to a fixed recipe. Different Pacamaras behave differently, and moisture, density, processing and crop age all shift how a lot responds once it’s in the drum. What our Roasting Team have instead is years of hands-on experience with this variety’s quirks, which is exactly what a coffee this sweet and delicate deserves.
Four coffees, one farm
This is our fourth coffee from Finca Argentina since August: the Centroamericano H1, the Natural Yellow Pacamara, the SL28 and now this. That run says a lot about what eighteen years of buying from the Martinez family makes possible. We don’t just get a reliable lot each harvest. We get to explore the farm with them, tablón by tablón and varietal by varietal, and taste how the same land expresses itself through different plants and different processes.
The Washed lots go through Los Ausoles, the cooperative mill in Ahuachapán, which has shown great consistency and reliability for us as buyers over the years. With Mauricio overseeing the farm and his daughter Beatrix now stepping into the family business, it’s a relationship we expect to be shouting about for a long while yet.
Read the full Martinez family producer story →
Traceability
- Country: El Salvador
- Department: Ahuachapán
- Municipality: Ahuachapán
- Nearest town: Turín
- Mountain range: Cordillera de Apaneca-Ilamatepec
- Farm: Finca Argentina
- Plot: San Jorge
- Producer: The Martinez Family
- Farm size: 35 hectares
- Elevation: 1,300 to 1,350 m.a.s.l.
- Variety: Yellow Pacamara
- Processing method: Washed
- Dry mill: Los Ausoles
- Relationship since: 2008
Cupping scores
Cupping notes: Tinned peach, strawberry, fruit salad sweets.
Cup of Excellence Cupping Scores
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Clean Cup: 7/8
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Sweetness: 7/8
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Acidity: 6.5/8
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Mouthfeel: 6/8
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Flavour: 6.5/8
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Aftertaste: 6/8
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Balance: 6/8
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Overall: 7/8
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Correction: +36
- Total: 88/100
If you’d like to find out more about how we score coffees, have a read of What Do Coffee Cupping Scores Actually Mean?, and if you fancy trying cupping yourself, we’ve got a guide to that too: What is Coffee Cupping.
Roasting information
Medium - push this steadily through the gap but finish the roast before second crack gets going, to preserve the complex fruit flavours.
