Starmaya F1: the Curious Case of an Improbable Coffee Hybrid

 “The trees, they are unbelievable,” Luiz tells me, “you can’t imagine how beautiful they are.” His eyes sparkle, and the way he draws his words out to express in English with a buttery Brazilian accent holds my attention. 

He turns his iPhone around, scrolling through images of lush leaves and coffee cherries ranging in shades of ripeness.

Luiz Paulo Dias Pereira Filho of Fazenda Santuário Sul

We’re at dinner, one of those post-convention client meetings, except that I’ve arranged a detour from the steaks and wine in downtown, opting instead for a prix fix menu at a Vietnamese restaurant on the west side of Chicago, its dishes perhaps a little more adventurous than I’d anticipated. Luiz is unflappable, dressed in casual attire as he scrapes seasoned pork filling from a snail shell. 

“In my opinion, it’s one of the best varieties we have on the farm nowadays,” he concludes, before directing my attention to the next set of photos involving fermentation under ultraviolet lights – maybe a story for another article.

Coffee cherries at Santuario Sul

I’ve been slightly obsessed with one of Luiz Paulo Pereira’s coffee plants, a cultivated variety1 called Starmaya, for two years now. Luiz himself first served it as a delicate and sparkling pour-over to me, somewhere in the sea of the 2022 Specialty Coffee Association Expo in Boston, and it hasn’t left my mind since. 

When Exemplar reached out to ask if I’d write for an issue on coffee varietals, I said sure, unaware that I’d be tasked with penning a thoughtful piece about the very coffee plant I’ve been irresponsibly fixated upon. When Phil told me he’d sourced this coffee from Luiz Paulo Dias Pereira Filho of Carmo Coffees and Fazenda Santuário Sul, I knew any adherence to journalistic impartiality would be an impossibility. 

Luiz Paulo and I first struck up a relationship when I worked for Intelligentsia, sometime around the summer of 2011. He’d been selling us coffee off and on through a third party from his family farms. I think I can take at least partial credit for making our business consistent and direct; there was always something special about the coffees he worked with in Carmo de Minas. 

As Luiz’s business grew and he became connected to the international world of elite specialty coffee suppliers, he was inspired to start an experimental farm, a variety test garden and fermentation lab where he could invest in new technologies and prove to the world that Brazil could stand toe to toe with any excellent coffee from anywhere. 

This is where his Starmaya grows, on Santuario Sul.

Coveted coffee cultivars, revered for their taste profile and cup score, are notoriously problematic for farmers, susceptible to disease, low-yielding, and/or difficult to propagate. 

Starmaya was one of the first of a new generation of trees bred to address this. 

“It’s the first hybrid coffee that can be reproduced by seed,” Luiz tells me. “What makes this variety very unique is that you can have a very uniform plantation.” 

Starmaya is what breeders call an F1 hybrid, which stands for “first filial” – an indication that the trees are the initial generation of descendants of two distinct parent trees. The appeal of F1 hybrids centers upon the distinct possibility of creating cultivars capable of expressing exceptional cup quality while remaining impressively productive and resilient. They dangle the carrot of deliciousness before the coffee buyer, while also promising profitability for the farmer. 

However, hybrids are notoriously non-uniform when they reproduce. New generations of trees must be purchased, almost always as saplings, from sophisticated breeders rather than started from seed on the farm. F1’s are bred in sterile lab environments where tissues are cloned and artificially reproduced, or manually pollinated one-by-one. These procedures are costly, time consuming, and difficult to scale, making their availability and affordability a challenge. 

But what if there was an alternative to somatic embryogenesis? 

Let’s say (hypothetically, right?) you wanted to go about creating a new generation of hybrid coffee trees, the old-fashioned way. Take a field of two distinct tree types, maybe a workhorse Sarchimor and a delicious but low-yielding Ethiopian landrace, and simply let nature run its course – the wind, birds, and bees set to work, flowers are fertilized, and new seeds form inside tiny green coffee fruits. These seeds would be non-uniform: some would be purebred landraces, a mixed assortment of Sarchimors would emerge, and some spontaneous hybrids, crossing both parent trees, would also be present. 

But what if one of the parent plant types was unable to produce pollen? 

In a field of trees where there was only one pollenating parent tree group, and one pollen receiver group, 100% of the seeds grown on the male-sterile parent would be the desired hybrid. 

This is the recipe for Starmaya, the descendant of a male-sterile Ethiopian/Sudanese landrace from a farm in Nicaragua called La Cumplida, and a next-generation Sarchimor called Marsellesa. The research and development are the work of the French Center for International Cooperation in Agricultural Research for Development (Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement, or CIRAD) and Swiss commodity traders ECOM Agroindustrial.

That Starmaya has dramatically improved scalability and distribution is unquestioned. Could the potentially disease-resistant and climate-tolerant cultivar, capable of substantial harvest volumes, meet quality expectations of buyers and result in farmer profitability? 

Luiz Paulo Pereira’s Santuário Sul, in the south of Brazil’s Minas Gerais State, is in some ways an unlikely test subject for these big questions. 

Brazil is not frequently viewed as a bastion of specialty cup quality. Its reputation has long been staked on high volumes and low prices. Given the opportunity to put down roots anywhere on an investment in high quality potential, coffee growers would surely first look elsewhere. 

However, Santuário Sul is a special slice of earth, self-described by Pereira as “obstinate” and “ahead of market trends.” The farm is hardly representative of either agro-industrial estates or the smallholder coffee-growing majority – producers with parcels of land in single-digit hectares. 

“In terms of quality, I’m so surprised by the different profile Starmaya can provide here in Brazil,” Luiz tells me. “Everybody who cups and tastes this coffee, they can’t imagine this quality coming from Brazil.”  He currently has about thirty hectares of Starmaya, and tells me he’s planting two to three additional hectares each year due to its high performance. Like all farmers, he still relies on F1 seeds from breeders rather than trying to recreate the hybrid himself, an ambitious, labor-and-time-consuming task which offers no guarantee of success. 

Luiz is in a unique position, where the cultivation of a precious cultivar on gifted terroir and overseen by watchful eyes and talented hands are all inseparable presuppositions. Not all farmers can dedicate these, or the countless other resources, required to cultivate such results. However, even if commercial cultivation is a specter of the quality Luiz is producing, Starmaya could represent a breakthrough.

Coffee saplings at Santuario Sul

In Boston, I was struck by the Starmaya’s elegant and prominent acidity, its prodigious sweetness and buoyant mouthfeel, its echoes of… what is that fruit exactly? 

There’s this tree in the courtyard of the apartment building where I live in Oakland, California. It fruits every year – bulbous clusters of deep crimson spheres, each the size of a large cherry. The local fauna won’t touch them, they fall to the ground and rot and create a mess on my shoes every time I walk past to do my laundry. Or at least they did, until I met Carlos, who bravely took the forbidden fruits from the tree with confidence. 

“Strawberry Guavas,” he smiles, a little red nectar staining the corner of his beard, and holds one out in the palm of his hand for me, and I indulge. 

As the name implies, the fruits give at once the impression of temperately grown sweet-tart red berries and the vibrant, ambrosial flavor of guava. Funny thing – the tree is native to Brazil, where it’s known as araçá. Serendipity, or coincidence? 

There’s virtually no chance that Starmaya will take over the bulk of production volumes anywhere, anytime soon. Generic Catimors and legacy varieties are too entrenched, too widespread, too easy for farmers to propagate without the fuss and expense of new varieties. 

But, as we’ve seen in Kenya, where new plantings of Batian – a complex hybrid with high cup quality potential – are beginning to outpace its less delicious predecessor Ruiru 11, it’s not unimaginable to envision a future where farmer profitability, sustainable productivity, and exceptional cup quality are compatible. That seems hopeful to me.