By Rachel Beebe
This winter we’re roasting our first ever Maracaturra variety coffee, grown in Nicaragua by Martha and Ana Albir. We chose this lot to be our Christmas Coffee as a celebration of the network of relationships that produced it and brought it to our shelves, and it just so happens that the unique variety is worth celebrating too.
Disappointingly, there isn’t a lot of information about Maracaturra available online, but sources agree that it’s a naturally occurring hybrid that first appeared in Brazil in the late 1800’s. Today, it’s most common in Nicaragua.
Genetically, it’s a hybrid of Maragogype (a Typica mutation) and Caturra (a dwarf Bourbon mutation). The Maragogype lent its enormous foliage and bean size and the Caturra passed on its dwarf stature and high yield. Farmers say that the compact stature and abundant foliage make this variety resistant to wind damage, but it is susceptible to leaf rust, so it takes careful maintenance to keep it healthy.
Of course for us, the most exciting aspect is the flavour profile, which, if grown at higher altitudes and processed well can have distinctively bright, complex acidity. The lot we’re roasting tastes like juicy ripe plums and has a creamy mouthfeel we love. A Maracaturra lot came in second at the Nicaragua Cup of Excellence competition this year, coming in less than a quarter point under two tying Gesha lots. So, yeah, it can be very tasty.
The one drawback of this variety is that the large bean size makes it much more susceptible to roast defects. These are defects that are introduced during roasting (as opposed to those introduced during processing and storage, i.e. mold or phenol). Roasting coffee is a balancing act between using enough of the right type of heat at the right time to cook the beans evenly from the centre to the outside without burning or baking them.
Burning happens in two ways - through tipping and scorching. Well, you can burn a coffee by roasting it dark, but that’s more a roasting style and not really a defect. Tipping happens when you roast coffee too quickly. It’s burning that occurs on the sensitive embryo end of the bean, where the seed would have germinated if it had been planted. Scorching happens when the drum of the roaster is too hot at the start of the roast. It looks like tiny brown spots on the greenish/yellow beans before they turn brown. The flat side of the bean comes into contact for too long with the too hot drum and burns. You can’t see scorching in roasted coffee, but you can taste its burnt flavour.
Baking is what happens when you roast a coffee too slowly. Slightly baked coffees taste flat, with low acidity and, often, high sweetness. They’re not unpleasant to drink as long as you aren’t expecting much flavour or complexity. And the sweetness is distinctive; if you’ve had a few baked coffees you can pick it out. Severely baked coffees taste totally muted and the distinctive baked flavour—it actually tastes like bread—is the primary one.
So, how to roast a Maracaturra, which is double the size of a typical coffee bean? You need enough heat to permeate the dense core but not so much that you end up burning the outside. Traditionally, roasters tackled these bigger coffees with a low and slow approach. This thinking was to cook it more slowly than a typical bean so that you don’t risk burning. I think this approach was probably a result of the limitations of older style roasting machines, which weren’t very adjustable. Nowadays you can control airflow or fan speed and some machines allow you to control drum speed as well. You can make a roaster more efficient by tweaking these inputs whereas previously all you could do was adjust the batch size.
We know a low/slow roast doesn’t work because we tried it. It tasted vegetal (indicating uneven cooking between the center and the outside of the bean) the acidity was thin and it wasn’t balanced by sweetness (indicating that the sugars weren’t developed). In hindsight, it also lacked the complexity that the final profile has. It wasn’t really burnt or baked, but it also wasn’t great.
It was clear we had to get more heat into the bean to cook it more evenly and get rid of the green, vegetal flavours. And, we also did a little research. In his book Cultivar, Rob Hoos explores the theory that plant variety is the first factor to look at when deciding how to roast a coffee, instead of origin (terroir) or processing method. He doesn’t have a section on Maracaturra, but he does talk about Maragogipe and Pacamara, both of which are genetically close to Maracaturra and also have giant beans. He recommends mitigating the risk of defects by increasing airflow, increasing drum speed and/or decreasing batch size.
So, we held our breath and turned up the gas. The result was remarkable. The flavours in the final roast are vibrant and complex. A deep pluminess is the primary fruit and suddenly we had a coating, syrupy body and sweetness. So much sweetness! When you hit the sweet spot in coffee the flavour resonates across the palate, from sip through swallow. To see how this coffee went from dull and flat to resonant and open was a great pleasure.
We hope you enjoy it as much as we do! You can grab yourself a tin here: Christmas Coffee 2025.