If you've been drinking our Panama coffees, you already know Ratibor Hartmann. Well. Now meet his daughter.
Yessie is a 4th generation coffee farmer and coffee runs in her veins. She's also an agronomist, so she sees things walking through that farm that I walk straight past. Her husband Jean Paul came up through the more commercial side of the industry, but he was always chasing a vision of his own. So in 2018, when they finally got their shot at their own lots, they took it. That's Gato Grande. And Jean Paul puts it better than I ever could: it was born out of love.
And where did they plant it? Los Pozos. Yup, the same region as Ratibor and Tessie's Mi Finquita. I've been going on about Pozos for years now and I'm not about to stop: something special is happening there.
I went to Gato Grande this year and, well, I fell in love too.
It is, fully, a coffee farm inside a native forest. They're up at 1800m of elevation, right on the boundary of the park, and parts of the property are genuinely virgin forest. Put in a crop and you've disrupted a balance, so the question they keep chewing on is how to give that balance back. Everything is managed as organically as they can. And sitting right on that boundary line, they love knowing the deforestation stops where their farm starts. They're doing the opposite. Putting trees back in the ground.
Jean Paul told me he believes the vibe of the farm affects the flavour in the cup, then immediately apologized for how corny that sounded. Corny? Nah. I think that's the whole thing.
The attention to detail on this farm is a little nuts. Jean Paul is a workaholic; I don't think I caught him standing still once. Yessie is an agronomist and she is meticulous, and I mean meticulous. Nothing gets left to chance. And you can taste it.
And they're building this thing for the long haul. When I asked why they wanted their own farm, family came up before coffee did, they'd love to see their son Jonas take up the baton one day.
Back to the coffee… every cherry is hand selected, carefully. They go into sealed bags overnight, which kicks off the lactic fermentation. From there it's depulped and placed into stainless steel tanks for 48 hours, held at a steady 18°C. And here's the part I love: Jean Paul doesn't stop that fermentation on a timer. He stops it by aroma. He's smelling his way to the finish line, and that is the kind of thing you can only pull off if you're committed and locked in, every single day.
Then it's washed and onto raised beds to shed its exterior water. The final stage happens in the darkroom, and you all know by now that's my favourite way to finish a coffee in Panama. But Jean Paul adds a step, and this is where it gets fun. At around 16% moisture he pulls it out entirely and rests it in sealed bags, letting the moisture buried deep inside migrate out and even itself across the whole bean. Then, and only then, back into the darkroom to finish, slow, below 11%.
That is a whole lot of handling for one little lot of coffee. I asked Jean Paul about it. He shrugged and said: “lots of work, lots of love”.
Ya. It is. Enjoy this one.
