Lost Origin x Las Margaritas #226

Lost Origin Coffee Lab is a Panama City-based processing lab founded in 2023 by Franz Zeimetz and Andy Typaldos, two friends who came to coffee through beer. Their coffee processing lab sits above their own craft brewery, Casa Bruja, where custom fermentation tanks track and adjust temperature, pressure, and agitation with the same precision brewers use on beer. Lost Origin is less a wet mill than a lab — one built to treat fermentation as a controlled variable rather than a folk tradition.

This particular lot is the result of a collaboration between Lost Origin and Thibaut Paggen, Even's Director of coffee, carried out earlier this year with coffee cherries from Finca Las Margaritas — a small estate in the Coquito sector of Volcán, on the western edge of Panama's celebrated Volcán–Boquete corridor. Sitting at 1,300 metres in the Chiriquí highlands, the farm is run by the Navarro family and planted with gesha, the variety that put this corner of Panama on the specialty map two decades ago. Altitude, cool nights, and volcanic soil give this gesha its floral backbone, high malic acidity, and dense terpene profile — the raw material Lost Origin had to work with. Cherries picked at Las Margaritas travel overnight by refrigerated truck to the lab in Panama City, where they are split into different lots, each fermented with a different intention. The result is three lots, from the same farm, same trees, same harvest, but with very different outcomes.

Lot #226 was left as whole cherry and cold-fermented for four days at 12.9°C with LOY-012. At that temperature, both acetic and lactic bacteria are effectively suppressed, and the intact cherry skin locks out oxygen — so pH (4.10 → 4.08) and Brix barely shift. What continues instead is the cherry's own respiration: fruit enzymes quietly break down sugars and build volatile esters — ethyl butyrate, ethyl hexanoate, methyl acetate — and terpene alcohols inside the pulp. This process is followed by twenty-five days of careful drying in Lost Origin’s drying rooms equipped with HEPA filters, and humidity and temperature controls.

In the cup, this cold fermentation amplified the fruit profile with none of the funk warm fermentation brings. You’ll find more intense florals, like violet, followed by notes of passion fruit and fresh mango. The acidity is bright and citric, while the sweetness reminds us of a raspberry jam.