Cafe Ruiz

Cafe Ruiz's roots go back to the late 1800s, when the Ruiz family first began growing coffee in Panama's Boquete Valley -- coffee country whose volcanic soil and highland climate would later make it one of Central America's most decorated growing regions. The modern company, Casa Ruiz, S.A., was formally established in 1979 to turn that inherited farming tradition into a proper roasting and export business, and it paid off in 2001 when Casa Ruiz won a best-coffee-in-the-world award -- the first Panamanian producer ever to do so, a result that helped put Boquete on the map for specialty buyers who had mostly overlooked Panama in favor of neighboring Costa Rica. Three generations of the Ruiz family have since worked the same farm, mill, and roastery, and the operation now runs public tours of its processing mill alongside guided cuppings such as "The Short Coffee Story" and "The Art of Tasting Coffee," aimed at visitors who want to taste the difference between processing methods rather than just drink a cup. What began as one family's 19th-century farm is now marketed as Panama's first gourmet coffee roaster, built on a lineage its own award record backs up.