PANAMA BARRETA - Caramel, Snickers Bar, Peachy Sweetness (100g)

Tasting Notes: Caramel, Snickers Bar, Peachy Sweetness. 

Each bag contains 100g of freshly roasted Arabica coffee.

This coffee was produced by Alvaro Gonzalez, a leader and trailblazer in his community of Barreta.

Alvaro and the coffee producers of Barreta have encountered endless obstacles for the past 12 years. They've worked with passion and determination, waiting for their time to come. Finally, they can make their coffee available to the world.

Damian Reed (@everythingcoffeefun) is a Canadian expat who arrived in Panama in the 1980's as a missionary. During his travels around Panama, he found himself in the coffee regions of Barreta, Coclé.

While he was delighted by the coffee available there, he was appauled by the poverty in the community and how tiny farmers were exploited by larger coffee companies.

The farmers worked their farms to sell arabica beans for as low as 50 cents/lb, barely meeting the cost of production leaving little or nothing left to take home to their families. Their farms were tiny: 1-3 hectares

So he spearheaded a project in 2008 to help these micro-producers. He formed a co-op with a processing station.

In 2012, the opening year of the co-op, the harvest looked promising with a good crop. But then Roya (coffee leaf-rust disease) came along and wiped out 90% of farms. Most farmers lost interest and gave up. And the co-op became dysfunctional. 

But Damian was determined and didn’t give up. He kept plugging away, tweaking and making improvements.

In 2020, the community of Barreta achieved an important milestone by exporting their coffee out of Panama for the first time.