In June 2025, the 29th Best of Panama (BOP) awards were presented in Boquete. In the Traditional Varieties category, Hacienda La Esmeralda took first place with a Laurina lot from its El Velo division, followed closely by a new face—Black Moon Farm, whose owner Hunter Tedman claimed second place with 92.63 points, bringing a traditional variety other than Geisha onto the podium.
Black Moon Farm is located in Alto Quiel above Boquete, at an altitude of about 1,700 to 1,780 meters, in the misty highlands of Chiriquí Province. In 2018, Hunter Tedman, who comes from an agronomy background, took over this land—at the time a vegetable farm that had been intensively cultivated for years, with visibly exhausted soil. The first thing he did was not plant coffee, but rather rebuild the soil as the estate's foundation. Tedman's approach is often summarized as "regenerative agriculture": with soil health at the center, rebuild biodiversity, and only then talk about yield and quality. In addition to coffee, he has gradually planted about four thousand native trees and fruit trees such as avocados and citrus, steadily building an ecosystem structure akin to a food forest. Healthy soil supports more uniform ripening; more uniform ripeness is what makes stable cup performance possible—this logic runs through Tedman's field management every day.
One of the most closely watched aspects of Black Moon Farm is its commitment to traditional varieties. In addition to growing Green Tip Geisha, which has deep ties to Costa Rica, the estate has also planted a number of aromatic varieties such as Chiroso, Pink Bourbon, Wush Wush, Sudan Rume, and Mocha. Since first entering the competition in 2022, Black Moon has appeared on the BOP winners' list almost every year, and its flagship Chiroso even took first place in that category in 2024. Tedman once served on the board of the Specialty Coffee Association of Panama (SCAP), so he knows the competition judging system well. The estate's record-keeping is almost rigorous to the extreme: harvest dates, fermentation duration, drying environment and cycle, and resting time are all recorded lot by lot, and even the moon phase during the harvest season is written into the archives. In recent harvest seasons, he switched to dark-room drying, extending the drying time in a controlled environment to reduce batch variation and stabilize aromatic compounds. In his eyes, record-keeping itself is a quality tool.
Traditional varieties do not often stand in the spotlight in Panama, where Geisha prevails, but Black Moon has used a system that starts with the soil to prove that they can also stand on the BOP podium. For those used to drinking Geisha, this 92.63-point traditional variety may be another entry point for getting to know "Panama beyond Geisha."
The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.
