A special Multiple time Top 3 Cup Of Excellence winning coffee that has beat Geishas in blind cupping.

Awarded both a 95 point score on CoffeeReview and was just chosen as one of the top 10 best coffees of 2024!

This coffee is an extremely rare cultivar from their Laboratory Farm that grows new cultivars. Bernadina

about 5 years ago, Maria Pacas found some unique coffees on a Finca La Providencia. This coffee was from only five trees on the property. Previously, the beans had always been just mixed in with the bourbon cultivar grown on the rest of the farm. Suspecting these trees were something special – possibly geisha – Geisha is not currently grown in El Salvador, so finding this sought-after varietal in a new country would be a huge find.

But Maria was not convinced it was just Geisha so They had sent a sample to a DNA lab in Italy. This new coffee’s DNA is 70%  identical to geisha. The remaining 30% was something previously unknown, closest only to a rare variety called agaro. But that’s where the origin story ends. How these five trees made it from the Agaro region in Ethiopia to the Finca La Providencia in El Salvador remains a mystery. The trees themselves are over 70 years old, so it’s likely that whoever had a hand in bringing them across the world is no longer living.

Since this was a previously undocumented variety, Maria Pacas had the honor of naming it. She named it bernardina after Ruperto Bernadino Merche, the farm manager at Finca La Providencia. Bernardino had long insisted that these five trees grew something very different and very special. He was not wrong and is deservedly immortalized for recognizing this unique, complex coffee.

This ultra rare coffee is vacuum packed into 15kilo bags and boxed to preserve every bit of the volatile compounds.  We bought the coffee directly from Maria and flew it straight to the roastery last week to get this rare coffee into our hands as fast as possible.

This is a Once Upon A Time of magical coffee 250grams total!