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.