Estela Pitti & her family have been producing Best of Panama auction lots at Finca Los Cenizos, their family’s farm in Cerro Punta, Tierras Altas since 2019. In the 2024 Best of Panama, their Geisha Washed leapt to 6th place after placing 16th in 2023. In the same year, their Geisha Natural placed 6th, while a Varietal ranked 8th, and in 2021, Varietals took 2nd Place, Geisha Washed 7th, and Geisha Natural 8th.
This consistent recognition underscores the family’s dedicated efforts in the thoughtful cultivation of coffee trees amid pristinely preserved, beneficial terroir and the devoted pursuit of ceaseless refinement in post-harvest processing.
Situated at 1800-2200 masl on a volcanic canyon in the vicinity of numerous mountain springs and lush with century-old ash trees thriving alongside fruit bearing species, coffee cherries ripen at a cadence that raises their potential for heightened flavor complexity and increases sweetness.
Estela Pitti is a first generation, female coffee producer in Boquete, Chiriqui, who grew up and went to school in Boquete. Her family’s roots in and love for the local agricultural landscape, albeit in adjacent disciplines to crop cultivation and production run deep. Her father, Patricio, was a rancher who took pride in the trade and rigors of raising cattle and American quarter-mile horses in the midst of Panama’s picturesque terrains and the joys of a down-to-earth, rural mode of living.
Through the friendships Patricio fostered with the coffee producers in the area, his appreciation of coffee grew. Beyond being a staple beverage to enjoy among friends, it became a personally fulfilling and more widely encompassing pursuit. He started to plant a several of coffee trees of the more common varieties, Catuai and Caturra, around their home in Boquete, spreading the joy of of coffee among his family.
Estela vividly remembers tagging along in her father’s pick up truck, after school, to visit his friend’s coffee mill. It was one of her formative experiences in witnessing how coffee was processed post-harvest and then roasted. More memorably, she experienced how drinking it could make people happy as their own family brewed and shared the small quantity they were gifted before heading back to their ranch work routine.
While Estela’s formal education led her to major in Business Administraton and, integrating that with a passion for interior design, subsequently to a successful career as an interior designer and project manager, her passion for coffee — sparked by her father’s in her childhood — had never waned.
Acquiring the farm, Finca Los Cenizos in 2008, was her most awaited opportunity to finally begin realizing it, and the first plantings of Geisha trees in 2012 had been the means to propel it.
Having married and eventually built a life around Cerro Punta with her children, Stella Marie and Niko, Estela’s thorough knowledge of its terroir — only 12 kilometers of mountainous terrain away from her childhood home and west of the Baru Volcano — is both instinctual and intimate.
With this unparalleled insight, Estela, Stella Marie, and Niko together work to materialize the vision of producing high-end terroir-driven coffees in harmony with nature and highlighting the special characteristics of their parcel of the Panamanian terroir.
