Varieties — A–Z

Ethiopian landrace (9)

• Chiroso — The long-beaned Colombian variety from one Antioquian town that everybody assumed was a Caturra mutation until the DNA pointed at Ethiopia — and that has never had a catalogue entry of its own.
• Ethiopian Gesha — What it means when a coffee is sold as Gesha from Ethiopia — the variety’s home country, which spent seventy years watching Panama earn the money, and which has only recently started selling the name back.
• Ethiopian heirloom — The word on almost every bag of Ethiopian coffee. It is not a variety, it is not an age, and it is not a quality claim — it is an admission that nobody wrote down which of Ethiopia’s thousands of local coffee types is in the bag.
• Geisha — The Ethiopian-origin variety whose jasmine-and-bergamot cup created the modern ultra-premium coffee market.
• JARC 74110 — The Ethiopian selection collected from forest trees in 1974 and released by the Jimma Agricultural Research Center in 1979 to survive coffee berry disease — and the plant behind Ethiopia’s third-place Cup of Excellence lots in 2022.
• JARC 74112 — One of the numbered Ethiopian selections from the Jimma Agricultural Research Center — the sibling of 74158, and a fixture in the Cup of Excellence results, including Ethiopia’s 2022 runner-up lot at $189.10 a pound.
• JARC 74158 — The numbered Ethiopian cultivar released by the Jimma Agricultural Research Center in 1979 — and the plant behind Ethiopia’s record-setting Cup of Excellence lots, including the highest COE auction price ever paid.
• JARC 74165 — The numbered Ethiopian cultivar from the Jimma Agricultural Research Center that won Ethiopia’s 2021 Cup of Excellence outright — the only anaerobic coffee ever to top the country’s national table.
• Pink Bourbon — The pink-cherried Colombian variety that turned out not to be a Bourbon at all — genetic testing commissioned by an importer found it is an Ethiopian landrace wearing somebody else’s name.

Bourbon–Typica (16)

• Acaiá — A widely planted Brazilian coffee variety with unusually big beans, grown across Minas Gerais and São Paulo, credited in the trade to Mundo Novo — and missing entirely from the international variety catalogue.
• Bourbon — One of the two founding Arabica varieties — a tall, disease-prone, sweet-cupping plant from a French island in the Indian Ocean that is the ancestor of much of the coffee grown today.
• Bourbon-Typica group — The genetic family that nearly every commercial Arabica variety belongs to — two batches of seed carried out of Yemen in the early 1700s, and the narrow gene pool the whole modern coffee crop was built on.
• Catuaí — The bred-on-purpose workhorse of Brazil and Central America — a short, heavy-cropping cross of Mundo Novo and yellow Caturra that quietly wins competitions it is never expected to win.
• Caturra — The short Brazilian mutation of Bourbon that let Latin America plant coffee shoulder-to-shoulder — productive, easy to pick, catches leaf rust badly, and still cups beautifully at altitude.
• Laurina — The naturally low-caffeine Arabica variety — a delicate, floral cup with about half the caffeine of ordinary coffee — that won the Varietals category at the 2025 Best of Panama.
• Maracaturra — The giant-beaned cross of Maragogipe and Caturra — a chance Nicaraguan seedling whose selection by INTA began in 1976 and was never finished, leaving an unstabilized variety with no catalogue entry that still places at the top of the Nicaragua Cup of Excellence.
• Maragogipe — The giant-bean mutation of Typica found in Bahia, Brazil in 1870 — a tall, sickly, low-yielding plant nobody farms for volume, kept alive as the parent of Pacamara and Maracaturra and as a Nicaraguan competition coffee that has scored over 90 at the Cup of Excellence.
• Mundo Novo — The accidental Bourbon-Typica cross found in a São Paulo field in 1943 that rebuilt Brazilian coffee after the war — tall, tough, endlessly productive in reputation, and the parent of Catuaí.
• Pacamara — El Salvador’s deliberately bred giant-bean variety — a cross of the dwarf Pacas with the oversized Maragogipe. It is fragile, low-yielding and refuses to breed true, and it still wins the Salvadoran Cup of Excellence more often than anything else.
• Pacamara Amarillo — The yellow-cherry form of Pacamara — a name that appears on Cup of Excellence lot sheets in three countries but in no variety catalogue. Four documented competition lots, all bought by Japanese roasters, none of them a winner.
• Pacas — El Salvador’s own dwarf mutation of Bourbon, found on the Pacas family’s farm in Santa Ana in 1949. It is about a quarter of the country’s crop, it catches leaf rust badly, and it is the Salvadoran half of Pacamara.
• SL28 — The flagship Kenyan coffee variety — a drought-hardy, disease-prone Bourbon descendant selected from a single tree in the 1930s, and the plant behind the blackcurrant taste the world calls “Kenyan coffee”.
• SL34 — The second half of “SL28 and SL34” — a single Kenyan tree selected in the late 1930s under a Bourbon label, which modern genetic testing revealed to be Typica instead. Exceptional in the cup, defenceless against disease.
• Typica — The other founding Arabica variety — a tall, fragile, barely productive tree that colonial trade carried out of Yemen and around the world, and that most coffee grown outside Ethiopia descends from.
• Villa Sarchi — Costa Rica’s own dwarf mutation of Bourbon, found in Alajuela in the 1950s or 60s. It has a small bean, no defence against leaf rust, and it is the Arabica parent of the entire Sarchimor family.

Rust-resistant (introgressed) (16)

• Anacafe 14 — The Guatemalan variety that started as a chance seedling in a farmer’s field around 1980 — a rust-resistant Catimor crossed back to Pacamara, released by ANACAFÉ in 2014, drought-tolerant, very large beans, and the rare Catimor that cups well. It is also not genetically stable, so a farmer’s own seed does not reliably give the same tree back.
• Arara — A yellow-cherried Brazilian variety released by Fundação Procafé in 2012 — rust-resistant, compact, heavily requested by Brazilian growers, and the rare introgressed hybrid that also wins cupping competitions.
• Batian — Kenya’s 2010 release — a tall, very-large-beaned composite bred from the SL trees and the Timor Hybrid, rated “Very good” in the cup, and the variety that quietly won China’s first internationally judged coffee competition.
• Castillo — The rust-resistant Colombian variety that replaced Caturra across an entire country. Bred by Cenicafé from Caturra and the Timor Hybrid, released in 2005, named after the researcher who found Colombia’s first rust-resistant variety — and not one plant but seven regional ones.
• Catimor — Not one variety but a whole family — Caturra crossed with the Arabica × Robusta Timor Hybrid to bolt rust resistance onto a productive dwarf tree. It worked, then partly stopped working, and the cup was never the point.
• Costa Rica 95 — The Catimor ICAFE bred for Costa Rica’s warmest, sourest ground — rated Low in the cup, confirmed susceptible to the rust it was built against, and then, in 2019, the variety that won a national Cup of Excellence outright in Peru.
• IAPAR 59 — Brazil’s Sarchimor — a compact, rust-resistant, medium-altitude workhorse the catalogue rates “Low” in the cup, and the variety a Brazilian farm is said to have won the 2017 Cup of Excellence with at 93.60 points.
• IHCAFE 90 — The lowland Catimor bred by IHCAFE in Honduras — high-yielding, very hungry, rated the bottom of the quality scale, susceptible to the rust it was built against, and yet a Catimor that has placed at Cup of Excellence — the only Honduran one to do so, though Costa Rica 95 outright won Peru 2019.
• IPR Alvorada — The 2024-published Paraná cultivar bred from IAPAR 59 and Mundo Novo — a compact, heavy-cropping farm tree with good-but-not-remarkable cup quality and only slight rust resistance, and no competition or auction record of any kind.
• Lempira — The Honduran workhorse — a Catimor bred by IHCAFE to survive coffee leaf rust, planted across the country by the million, and now confirmed susceptible to the very disease it was made for.
• Marsellesa — The Nicaraguan Sarchimor released in 2009 — a rust-resistant, high-yielding dwarf that cups better than the Catimors it was meant to replace, and the mother of Starmaya, the only F1 hybrid coffee you can grow from seed.
• Ruiru 11 — The compact, disease-proof Kenyan variety bred after a berry-disease epidemic wiped out half the national crop — high-yielding, hard to kill, and permanently in the shadow of the SL trees it was meant to replace.
• Sarchimor — The other rust-resistance family — Villa Sarchi crossed with the Timor Hybrid instead of Caturra. Same bargain as Catimor, but it kept more of the cup, and one of its selections keeps placing in the Cup of Excellence.
• Tabi — The Cenicafé variety bred the other way round — tall instead of dwarf, and crossed onto Bourbon and Typica rather than Caturra, so the cup came along with the rust resistance. Announced by its breeder in 2002 after a programme that began in the 1970s.
• Timor Hybrid — A coffee tree nobody bred — an accidental Arabica × Robusta cross found on the island of Timor that turned out to carry rust resistance. It is the ancestor of most disease-resistant Arabica varieties planted today.
• Variedad Colombia — Colombia’s first rust-resistant variety, released by Cenicafé in the early 1980s — and deliberately not one plant but a blend of sister lines. It carried the national crop for two decades before Castillo replaced it.

F1 hybrids (2)

• Esperanza — A Central American F1 hybrid — Sarchimor line T5296 crossed with an Ethiopian accession held at CATIE — that was passed over for release, then pulled into Costa Rican fields by farmers who wanted something that survives a wet climate and still cups well.
• Starmaya — The first Arabica F1 hybrid that can be grown from seed instead of cloned in a laboratory — bred by CIRAD and ECOM from a pollen-less Ethiopian mutant crossed with Marsellesa, and the variety that made hybrid coffee cheap enough to sell by the sack.

Other species (4)

• Arabica vs Robusta — The two species that make up almost all the world’s coffee, compared on the things that actually differ — chromosomes, caffeine, sugar and fat, where each will grow, what each is worth, and which one the competitions are built around.
• Excelsa — The fourth coffee — a big drought-tolerant tree from the Lake Chad basin, folded into Liberica in 2006 and split back out as its own species in 2025, sold in tiny quantities for its dried-fruit, spice and dark-chocolate cup.
• Liberica — The third coffee species — a giant, low-altitude tree from West Africa that briefly rivalled Arabica in the 1880s, collapsed, and survives today mostly in the Philippines and Malaysia as a bold, jackfruit-scented cup.
• Robusta — The second coffee species — a hardy, high-caffeine African plant that grows where Arabica cannot, supplies most of the world’s instant coffee, gave breeders their rust resistance, and is only now being cupped as specialty.

Pests & disease (3)

• Coffee berry borer — The 1.5 mm black beetle that drills into a coffee cherry and eats the seed from the inside — the most damaging insect pest of coffee on earth, and the reason a lot can lose points before it ever reaches a cupping table.
• Coffee berry disease — The African fungal rot that blackens green coffee cherries on the branch before the bean inside is finished — the disease that rebuilt Kenya’s farms and sits behind half the resistance ratings in the variety catalogue.
• Coffee leaf rust — The orange fungal disease that strips coffee trees of their leaves — the single most destructive disease in coffee, and the reason half the varieties on modern farms exist at all.

Everything else (32)

• Alcides Carvalho — The Brazilian plant breeder who ran coffee research at the Instituto Agronômico de Campinas for four decades and is credited with the 1949 cross that became Catuaí — the man behind varieties almost nobody buying Brazilian coffee has heard of.
• Caffeine — The bitter alkaloid the coffee plant makes to poison insects — how much of it is in a bean, how much reaches a cup, what it does to a taster, and why almost every number attached to it is a range rather than a figure.
• CATIE — The Costa Rican research centre in Turrialba that keeps a living library of about 2,000 coffee plants — the collection Geisha passed through on its way to Panama, and the source of the F1 hybrids Centroamericano and Esperanza.
• Cenicafé — The research centre of Colombia’s growers’ federation, founded in 1938. It bred Castillo, Variedad Colombia, Tabi and Cenicafé 1, wrote the textbook definition of washed coffee, and built the machines that cut washing water use by 99%.
• CIFC — A small Portuguese laboratory outside Lisbon, founded in 1955, that spent seventy years cataloguing coffee leaf rust and the plants that survive it — and whose catalogue numbers are stamped on the parentage of nearly every rust-resistant coffee variety planted today.
• Climate change and coffee — What the peer-reviewed literature actually projects for arabica as the climate warms — which countries lose the most land by 2050, why altitude only buys time, and which of the famous numbers turn out to be unsourceable.
• Coffee cherry — The small red fruit that a coffee bean lives inside. Six layers wrapped around one or two seeds — and every processing method in coffee is just a different decision about which of those layers to take off, and when.
• Enigma — Not a coffee variety at all — “Enigma” is a lot name used by Finca Deborah and Savage Coffees in Panama for a carbonic-maceration Geisha, and separately a brand name for two unrelated coffee companies in Los Angeles and Colombia.
• Ethiopia — The country where the arabica plant actually evolved — the only place on earth with wild coffee forests, and the ancestor of nearly every coffee tree in the world, by way of a very narrow escape through Yemen.
• F1 hybrid — The class of coffee varieties made by crossing two very distant parents — unusually productive and often unusually good in the cup, but impossible to grow from saved seed, which is the whole reason they are still rare.
• Fazenda Aparecida (Urupês) — The farm in Urupês, São Paulo whose unusually vigorous coffee trees brought the Instituto Agronômico de Campinas to town in 1943 — the field where the Mundo Novo variety was found, in a municipality that was itself called Mundo Novo at the time.
• Fine Robusta — The grading standard that lets Robusta be sold as specialty — a separate cupping form, an 80-point line, and green-coffee rules strict enough that most Robusta fails on looks before anyone tastes it.
• Fundação Procafé — The Brazilian non-profit coffee research and extension foundation in Varginha, Minas Gerais, built to keep the defunct IBC’s gene bank, laboratories and experimental farms working. Not the same body as the Salvadoran, Puerto Rican or Nicaraguan PROCAFE.
• Gesha Village Coffee Estate — The 471-hectare farm in far western Ethiopia that planted Geisha back where it came from — built from wild seed gathered 20 km away, and now the only estate in the world running an annual auction dedicated to Ethiopian Gesha.
• Gori Gesha forest — The wild coffee forest in southwestern Ethiopia named as the original home of the Geisha variety — a place almost every record-breaking coffee of the last twenty years traces back to, and about which almost nothing is formally documented.
• Guayabita — A coffee variety found growing wild on Finca Sophia in Panama, named by the farm and grown nowhere else — tiny round beans, unknown parentage, and no independent genetic confirmation.
• IAPAR — The Paraná state agricultural research institute that bred IAPAR 59 and the IPR coffee cultivars, rebuilt the state’s coffee sector after the 1975 frost, and has since been merged into IDR-Paraná.
• Innovea Global Breeding Network — World Coffee Research’s multi-country breeding programme — eleven national coffee institutes planting the same experimental trees at once, so a new climate-resilient variety takes years instead of decades.
• Instituto Agronômico de Campinas — The São Paulo state agricultural institute, founded by an emperor in 1887, whose coffee breeding programme produced Mundo Novo and Catuaí and selected Caturra — the three varieties most of Brazilian and Central American coffee is built on.
• Jimma Agricultural Research Center — Ethiopia’s national coffee research centre, founded in 1967 and part of the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research. It collected the forest landraces behind the numbered varieties — 74158, 74110, 74112 — that now win Ethiopia’s Cup of Excellence.
• Maria do Céu Silva — A Portuguese plant pathologist at CIFC in Oeiras whose work is on what happens inside a coffee leaf in the first hours after rust lands on it — one of the two names that recur across half a century of coffee rust research, and a person with no farm, no lot and no cupping score anywhere.
• Mokkita — A tiny-cherried Panamanian coffee variety grown on about two hectares at one farm, Mama Cata in Boquete — winner of Best of Panama’s non-Geisha category two years running and the subject of a 97-point Coffee Review score.
• Pacas family — The Salvadoran growing family a whole coffee variety is named after. Five generations in Santa Ana, nineteen farms, one central mill — and the odd position of being famous for a plant rather than for a coffee.
• Peaberry — The round coffee bean that grew alone in the cherry — an accident of pollination, not a variety or a process, sorted out into its own grade and sold at a premium on a reputation the evidence does not quite support.
• Rume Sudan — The wild-collected Arabica that almost nobody drinks and almost every modern disease-resistant variety is built from — a low-yielding plant from the Boma highlands kept alive as breeding stock, and lately grown as a rare Colombian microlot.
• Scott Agricultural Laboratories — The colonial-era Kenyan research station that put the “SL” in SL28 and SL34. Its institutional chronology is now documented — a Kabete station from 1903, the Scott name from 1924, coffee research gone to Ruiru by 1949 — but its namesake and its site details still rest on single unread sources.
• Selective picking — Sending pickers back through the same trees again and again to take only the ripe cherries — the single most expensive quality decision on a coffee farm, and the one that only pays if somebody downstream is buying on taste.
• Sidra — The Ecuadorian competition variety with no confirmed pedigree — a tall, thick-trunked plant that has carried two World Barista Championship winners, while no official variety registry can say what it actually is.
• SL14 — The third Scott Laboratories selection — a tall, drought- and cold-tolerant Kenyan tree picked in 1936 that never became famous at home, but quietly turned into one of the workhorse Arabicas of Ugandan coffee.
• Timor-Leste — The half-island origin that gave the coffee world its most important accidental plant, the Timor Hybrid — a tiny, mountainous, almost entirely smallholder and largely organic Arabica producer of roughly 320,000 bags a year, with no auction, no competition circuit and almost no published scores.
• Typica Mejorada — The Ecuadorian competition variety whose name is wrong — it has no Typica in it, no entry in any variety register, and it still won Ecuador’s 2021 Cup of Excellence at 90.39 points and $97.10 a pound.
• World Coffee Research — The industry-funded nonprofit that breeds new coffee varieties and keeps the variety catalogue this wiki cites on almost every plant.