Soil first, in the highlands above Boquete
Black Moon Farm sits in Alto Quiel, above Boquete, in Panama's Chiriquí province, at roughly 1,700–1,780 metres above sea level. It is run by Hunter Tedman, who took on a former intensive vegetable farm with tired soil in 2018 and has been rebuilding it into a coffee farm organised around soil health. That starting point matters because it gives the farm a clear operating logic: soil before yield, system before single harvest. Black Moon is not a long-established estate trading on reputation; it is a working farm being rebuilt from the soil up.
From vegetable farm to coffee ecosystem
Years of intensive vegetable production had left the soil depleted. Tedman treats that soil as the farm's primary asset, not the surface a crop sits on. Coffee was first planted in 2018 alongside around four thousand other trees — native species and fruit such as avocado and citrus — to build a canopy and move the farm towards a biodiverse food forest, where coffee grows as part of a working ecology rather than in cleared rows.
The working logic is plain: rebuild soil fertility, increase biological life, and improve the conditions under which coffee grows. Drawing carbon down into the soil is one of the farm's stated aims, but the practical point is the chain it sets up. Better soil can support healthier plants; healthier plants ripen fruit more evenly; more even ripening gives a stronger basis for quality. The trade-off is patience. Progress is slower this way, and practices that might raise yield at the soil's expense are left out.
The growing environment
Alto Quiel's microclimate does real work. The area is cool and often misty — conditions that can slow the rate at which cherries ripen. Slower ripening gives fruit more time to develop sugars and aromatic precursors, which can support cups with clearer structure. Black Moon pairs this with timing, harvesting in the drier part of the year to concentrate the fruit and keep drying controllable. That matters because quality built on the tree can still be lost after picking; steadier drying conditions help preserve detail and keep lots consistent.
Hunter Tedman's role
Tedman holds the system together. His contribution is operating discipline more than origin story: how the farm is structured, how closely it is recorded, and a willingness to work on long timelines. He sits on the board of the Specialty Coffee Association of Panama, close to the conversations that decide how quality is judged in competition. The point for a reader is method: Black Moon is run by someone who treats coffee as a system to document and improve, not a single good season to repeat.
Varieties and genetic direction
Panama is best known for Geisha, and Black Moon grows it: the farm presents its trees as Green Tip lineage connected to Costa Rican stock from the late 1960s. The stronger point is not the lineage but the intent behind it — preserving a clear variety identity while deliberately planting beyond Geisha. The farm's best-known coffee is Chiroso, an Ethiopian-linked landrace that gained wider attention through Colombia. The results are concrete: Black Moon's Chiroso "Constellation" placed first in the Varietals category at Best of Panama 2024 with a score of 94.13, and sold at auction for $1,630 per kilogram — the first non-Geisha to pass $1,000 per kilogram in that category. Pink Bourbon, Wush Wush, Sudan Rume and Mokha round out the planting. The pattern is a range of high-aromatic varieties chosen to show detail under a soil-first system, not reliance on one famous name.
Processing and documentation
Where many farms record little beyond "washed", "natural" or "honey", Black Moon documents each lot closely: harvest date, fermentation method and length, drying environment and duration, resting time and storage. A recurring feature of recent harvests is dark-room drying — enclosed drying over long, controlled periods, used to stabilise aromatics and reduce variability. This is process control rather than novelty: recording variables consistently is what lets a farm compare seasons and improve on purpose rather than by instinct. The records run as far as the moon phase at harvest — a detail that matters less in itself than as a measure of how much the farm writes down.
The farm also takes a clear position on where flavour should come from. Across specialty coffee there is ongoing debate about "altered" coffees, where flavour seems to come from added cues rather than from variety, place and fermentation. Black Moon appears to be taking a different position: that the flavour in the cup should be traceable to genetics, environment, biology and process. It reads as a preference for coffee that can be explained by its own system, not a judgement on how others work.
"Documentation is a quality tool, not a marketing prop."
