Panama - CCD Casa Blanca Jaramillo Nano Lot RSV 32

Creativa Coffee District (CCD) in Panama produced the championship-winning coffees in the China and Qatar 2023 National Barista Championships.

CCD was founded in 2017 by the same freethinking and entrepreneurial dreamers who built La Palma y El Tucan, Felipe Sardi and Elisa María Madriñan, along with fellow believers in the transformative potential of integrating art-making and coffee processing. Their goal is to guarantee more equitable livelihoods for the coffee farmers within their sphere of influence, while ensuring the sustainable production of distinctive and high-quality coffees, for the enjoyment of coffee lovers, even specialty coffee aesthetes.

Acting on their convictions, they refashioned and fitted out a 1960s-era wet mill and drying yard into a contemporary facility focused on innovative processing methods while keeping its original industrial aesthetic salient. In this space, the team at CCD explores ways of pinpointedly controlling fermentation and drying parameters to encourage the most unique and desirable attributes of their partner farmers’ meticulously cultivated and hand-harvested coffee cherries to stand out.

One of those partner farmers is 77-year-old Enrique Pretel, owner of Casa Blanca Jaramillo, a Boquete farm for 12 years, of which eight have been exclusively devoted to coffee production across his six-hectare land area, which is planted with 7,000 coffee trees, predominantly of the Geisha, Pacamara, and Caturra varieties.

Having benefited from the ability of high-quality specialty coffee to provide economic stability to his own family, he employs additional workers from households in the vicinity to expand the scope of specialty coffee’s rewards within their community. A woman in coffee, Anayansi Nuñez, is one of those workers. She has been entrusted with the farm’s management by Enrique (who has taken up residence outside of Panama) and represents him as the face of the farm.

As for the rest of the workers, their main task is to ensure the harvest of healthy and properly ripe cherries that are viable for post-harvest processing by CCD, whose philosophy of combining art and coffee Enrique has always believed to be an effective way of motivating their youth to become invested and carry on in the industry.

The Exporter:

Equation Coffee represents a small group of like-minded Panama and Colombia producers that enact eco-socially conscious choices in their coffee cultivation, processing, and marketing. They are La Palma & El Tucan, Delagua Coffee Paradise, and Creativa Coffee District. Their business model, called Neighbors & Crops, is geared towards invariably innovating and delivering premium specialty coffee while making a lasting, beneficial impact on the community and the environment.
Our long-term relationship with Equation Coffee has allowed us to make internationally sought-after coffees available here in our corner of the world.

Panama Geisha, of which Green Tip Geisha is one variation, is a rare, delicate, and complex variety well-loved for its sweet florality and citrus highlights. Since its debut win at the Best of Panama auction in 2004, it has kept specialty coffee lovers everywhere captivated by its endless possibilities, delicacy, complexity, and clarity of flavors.

As such, it is often showcased on coffee competition stages by a great number of coffee champions, and it also continues to fetch the highest prices.

While a coffee’s truest intrinsic qualities are still largely believed to be showcased best by traditional washed processing due to the demucilaging, washing, and scrubbing steps removing all traces of fruit from the bean, the expertise of seasoned and passionate producers like Creativa Coffee District allows them to direct the flavor character of the Panama Geisha towards a seemingly endless diversity of delightfully surprising trajectories.

With their “Intrinsic Cherry” natural processing technique, after flotation and quality screening, the hand-selected cherries were allowed to ferment in aerobic conditions only overnight, after which they were set to dry.

Throughout drying, the cherries were closely monitored to ensure meeting parameters that would lead to reduced acidity alongside greater complexity and, overall, the development of a silky body, phosphoric acidity, and a cup character predominantly evoking yellow fruits.