Pacamara Coffee: The Giant Bean From El Salvador
Key takeaways
Pacamara is a cross of Pacas and Maragogipe, bred in El Salvador: the research started in 1958 and the first release came in 1980.
It is a small shelf: 135 lots in stock from 103 roasters, about one coffee in a hundred on Cuppd.
El Salvador grows 59 of those 135 lots (44%); Colombia is a distant second with 21.
The 'herbal, savoury' reputation barely shows on the bags: 13% of lots carry a spice or herb note, while 55% carry a fruit one.
Washed Pacamara reads chocolate, caramel and almond; natural Pacamara swaps the almond for cherry and strawberry.
Questions this article answers
What is Pacamara coffee?
What does Pacamara coffee taste like?
Why are Pacamara beans so big?
Where is Pacamara coffee grown?
Is Pacamara a hybrid?
Is Pacamara worth buying?
Hold a Pacamara bean next to an ordinary coffee bean and it looks like a printing error. It is roughly the size of a peanut, it rattles differently in the grinder, and it comes from a tree that was put together on purpose in El Salvador.
It is also properly scarce. There are 135 Pacamara coffees in stock on Cuppd right now, from 103 roasters — about one bag in every hundred on the site. So here is where it came from, what 135 bags of it actually taste like (the 'herbal' reputation does not survive the count), who stocks it, and where to start.
Salvadoran Pacamara in stock right now
What is Pacamara coffee?
Pacamara is a cross between two Arabica varieties, Pacas and Maragogipe — and the name is just the first four letters of each, glued together. Pacas is a dwarf mutation of Bourbon found in 1949 on a farm owned by the Pacas family in Santa Ana, El Salvador. Maragogipe is a mutation of Typica discovered near the Brazilian town of Maragogipe in 1870, and it is famous for one thing: enormous beans.
Natural mutation: a plant that changes on its own, without anyone crossing it. Pacas grew shorter than its Bourbon parents; Maragogipe grew bigger beans than its Typica ones.
El Salvador's coffee research institute started crossing the two in 1958. The idea was to keep Maragogipe's giant, good-tasting beans and lose its terrible yields, by borrowing the short, tidy tree of Pacas. The first release went to farmers in 1980, but according to El Salvador's own agriculture ministry the launch that actually stuck came in 1992. Thirty-four years from first cross to a variety farmers trusted is not unusual in coffee. It is just very long.
What came out is fussy. World Coffee Research rates Pacamara's yield as low, its leaf-rust resistance as very poor, and its seed as unstable — plants do not reliably come true from one generation to the next. The same catalogue rates its cup quality at altitude as exceptional, and notes that it frequently dominates El Salvador's Cup of Excellence competition. That combination — hard to grow, great to drink — is the whole Pacamara story.
Cup of Excellence: a national competition where a jury cups hundreds of lots blind and the winners are auctioned online. Winning one is the fastest way for a farm to get noticed.
What does Pacamara coffee taste like?
Sweet first, then fruit — not herbs. Every write-up of Pacamara says 'herbal' or 'savoury' somewhere, so we checked. Of the 135 lots in stock, 17 list a spice or herb note (nutmeg, cinnamon, basil, black pepper and friends): 13%. Seventy-four list a fruit note, 55%. Another seventy-four list chocolate, caramel or brown sugar, also 55%. The savoury streak is real but it is a minority report.
The individual notes say the same. Chocolate leads at 18% of lots, then caramel (15%), cherry (12%), and peach, honey and milk chocolate (11% each). Roasters printed 121 different notes on the bags — a lot for a variety this small, which fits a coffee people describe as 'never boring'. Black tea, a common suspect for the 'herbal' label, turns up on only 3%.
Processing splits it cleanly. Washed Pacamara (79 lots, 59% of the shelf) is the nutty, sweet one: caramel on 18% of washed lots, almond on 16%, peach on 13%. Natural Pacamara (47 lots) drops the almond almost entirely — one natural lot out of 47 lists it — and adds dark fruit: cherry on 17%, strawberry on 15% and plum on 13%. Not one washed Pacamara in stock lists strawberry. If you want to know why processing changes a coffee this much, our processing guide walks through it.
Natural Pacamara — cherry, strawberry, tropical fruit
And for the minority who came for the savoury side, it does exist:
The spice-and-herb end — pepper, cardamom, cinnamon, cucumber
Why is Pacamara so closely tied to El Salvador?
Because it was bred there, for Salvadoran farms, and most of it never left. Fifty-nine of the 135 lots in stock come from El Salvador — 44% of all Pacamara. Flip it around and Pacamara accounts for nearly one in five of the 314 Salvadoran coffees in stock. For the country itself, its other varieties and its regions, see our El Salvador coffee guide.
On the bags, three Salvadoran regions do most of the work. Apaneca, in the west, is the most-tagged region for Pacamara anywhere (13 lots), with neighbouring Ahuachapán (12) and Chalatenango, up on the Honduran border (10). Salvadoran Pacamara is the sweetest version: milk chocolate on 17% of lots, caramel on 15%, honey on 14%, and a floral note on 10%.
Fun fact
One of the Salvadoran naturals above lists Café Pacas as its producer: the coffee business of the Pacas family, on whose farm Pacamara's dwarf parent turned up in 1949. That bag is about as close to the source as Pacamara gets.
Where else is Pacamara grown?
In 16 other countries, but in small numbers. Colombia has 21 lots, then Nicaragua (19), Guatemala (12), Honduras (9), and Brazil and Peru (8 each). Guatemala treats it as a prestige variety on its famous estates — our Guatemala guide calls that its 'Pacamara problem'.
Colombian Pacamara is the fruit-forward outlier. Cherry turns up on 24% of the 21 Colombian lots, chocolate on 19% and raspberry on 14%, and a lot of it comes out of Huila — 9 lots. Nicaraguan Pacamara goes the other way: chocolate on 26% of 19 lots and almond on 16%, closer to the washed Salvadoran style than to Colombia's.
Pacamara beyond El Salvador
Which roasters sell the most Pacamara?
Almost nobody stocks more than one. Of the 103 roasters selling Pacamara right now, 84 have exactly one in stock — 82% — and only two carry five or more. It is a guest coffee, the bag a roaster buys when a good lot comes along, not a line it builds a menu around.
The top two hold 14 lots between them, 10% of the shelf, and they could not be more different. Coda Coffee Company has eight, but every one is a multi-origin blend with Pacamara as one ingredient among several. VolCa Coffee in Sweden has six, all single-origin Salvadoran Pacamara — the purest specialist list in the catalogue. Behind those two the field is flat: Red Rooster, Klatch and Gust have three Pacamaras each, all Salvadoran.
That is why there is no roaster card on this page. Coda's blends and most of VolCa's lots do not yet pass the data checks our coffee pages need (producer, altitude and so on), and nobody else stocks enough Pacamara to fill one. For this variety, the carousels above are the better shopping list.
How should you buy your first Pacamara?
Start washed, and start Salvadoran. That is the version the variety was bred for and the one that shows its trademark sweetness — caramel, milk chocolate, a bit of stone fruit — without a process stacked on top. Then buy a natural, ideally from the same country, and taste the two together.
Brew it as filter if you want to taste the fruit, but this is one of the few prized varieties that also makes a genuinely good espresso. The big, sweet, chocolate-leaning washed lots handle a shot well, and that heavier body makes it nicer with a splash of milk than a Geisha or a Kenyan. Grind a touch coarser at first: the beans are big and dense and can choke a grinder setting dialled in for something smaller.
Pacamara is the rare 'special' variety that is sweet before it is weird. Most of it tastes of caramel and cherry, a little of it tastes of pepper, and all of it comes in beans the size of peanuts. Browse all 135 Pacamara coffees in stock, grab a washed Salvadoran one, and rate it on Cuppd so the next person knows which lot was worth the hunt.
How did we count 135 Pacamara coffees?
Every number on this page is a count from the Cuppd catalogue, not an estimate or a survey. Specifically:
- Source: the product listings on 940 specialty roasters' own online shops, not marketplaces or resellers. A coffee counts once per roaster listing.
- In stock: every coffee is re-checked against the roaster's shop once a month. All 135 Pacamara lots here were confirmed available on 2 October 2026.
- Variety: as the roaster labels it. 'Red Pacamara' is merged into Pacamara; its parents, Pacas and Maragogipe, are counted as their own varieties and are not in these figures.
- What counts as a Pacamara: any coffee whose roaster lists Pacamara among its varieties. 92 of the 135 are pure Pacamara; 43 list other varieties too, 13 combine several origins and 6 are named as blends.
- Tasting notes: the roaster's own notes, mapped onto a shared vocabulary of 330 notes so that spelling variants and near-synonyms count as one note. A lot can list several notes, so shares do not add up to 100%. The fruit, spice-and-herb and chocolate-and-caramel groups are note families we defined; the brief lists every note in each.
- Not ranked: nothing here is scored or sponsored. The roasters above are ordered by how many Pacamara lots they stock, nothing else.
Pacamara on the price index
October 2026€72 per kg at the median, +26% vs all coffees. Half of Pacamara coffees cost between €60 and €89/kg, across 128 coffees from 103 roasters.
See the Cuppd Specialty Coffee Price Index →