Anacafe 14

Anacafe 14 is a coffee variety released by ANACAFÉ, Guatemala’s national coffee association, in 2014.¹ It belongs to the Catimor family — the crosses built on the Timor Hybrid, the natural Arabica–Robusta cross that carries resistance to Coffee leaf rust — but with one extra step that changes everything about how it tastes. Its parentage is (Timor Hybrid 832/1 × Caturra) × Pacamara: a standard Catimor crossed a second time with the giant-beaned Salvadoran variety.¹

That second cross is the whole story. Most Catimors bought rust resistance by giving up the cup — Lempira and IHCAFE 90 next door in Honduras rate Low and Very low for quality potential, the bottom of the World Coffee Research scale. Anacafe 14 rates “Good,” the same rating Caturra itself gets.¹ Going back to Pacamara appears to have bought back what the Timor Hybrid cost.

And it was not designed. It was found.

Where it came from

Around 1980, in the Department of Chiquimula in eastern Guatemala, a Catimor plant crossed with a Pacamara on its own, with nobody arranging it. A farmer named Francisco Manchamé noticed the resulting tree.¹ ANACAFÉ took the material in and put it through mass selection and genealogical selection — sowing it out, keeping the best offspring, sowing those again — and released it commercially 34 years later, in 2014.¹

It is worth being clear about what ANACAFÉ’s role was. The association selected, evaluated and released the variety; nothing read here shows it owns the plant in any proprietary or plant-breeders’-rights sense. Call it breeding and release stewardship, not ownership.

To verify — the dates at both ends

• The discovery year is approximate. The World Coffee Research catalogue says the natural cross happened “around 1980,”¹ and other write-ups say “the early 1980s.” No documented date, and no ANACAFÉ discovery record, was found.
• The release month is single-sourced. 2014 is confirmed by the catalogue.¹ A social-media post claims the launch was specifically July 2014;² that is one source, of the weakest tier, and no official ANACAFÉ release notice was located. Say 2014.

What the catalogue says

Every row below is from the World Coffee Research catalogue entry for Anacafe 14, read directly.¹

Genetic group	Introgressed (Catimor-related) — carries Robusta DNA
Parentage	(Timor Hybrid 832/1 × Caturra) × Pacamara
Bred by	ANACAFÉ, Guatemala
Year released	2014
Stature	Dwarf / compact
Leaf tip colour	Green
Bean size	Very large
Yield potential	High
Quality potential at high altitude	Good
Coffee leaf rust	Intermediate resistance
Coffee berry disease	Susceptible
Nematodes	Susceptible
Nutrition requirement	High
Ripening period	Late
Planting density	4,000–5,000 plants/ha, single-stem pruning
Optimal altitude	>1,200 m near the equator (5°N–5°S); >900 m at 5–15°; >700 m above 15°
Also	Drought tolerant; not uniform — plants are not stable from one generation to the next

Three rows in that table are unusual for the family. Green leaf tips, where most Catimor lines show bronze. Very large beans, which is Pacamara’s contribution and a visible one — big screen sizes carry a price premium of their own. And drought tolerance, which is the trait that actually put this variety in the ground: it was aimed at Guatemala’s warmer, drier eastern zones rather than the cool trophy highlands.

To verify — a yield rating that conflicts with this wiki, and two altitude figures

• Yield. The catalogue page read for this note rates yield potential “High.”¹ This wiki’s Catimor note currently says “Anacafe 14: high to very high,” and the research report behind this note calls the variety “very high yielding.” Prefer “High” — that is what the catalogue field says — and treat “very high” as unsupported until someone produces the source it came from.
• Altitude. The catalogue’s own bands are the table above.¹ The research report behind this note reports a WCR statement that the variety “performs well above 1,300 metres,” and a Spanish-language training video claims stable cup quality from 930 m to 1,450 m.³ Neither figure was found on the catalogue page as read. The video is a plausible field-trial range but is a single, non-authoritative source; do not quote 930–1,450 m as an established cultivation range.

The instability problem

This is the constraint that matters most to a farmer, and the catalogue states it flatly: “Variety not uniform; plants are not stable from one generation to the next.”¹

In plain terms: if you grow Anacafe 14 and save seed from your own trees to replant, the next generation will not reliably be the same coffee. Height, ripening, disease behaviour and cup can all drift. Every replanting has to come from a controlled seed source rather than from the farm itself.

That is a real cost, and it lands hardest on exactly the smallholder the variety otherwise suits — the farm on warm, dry, marginal ground that cannot easily buy certified seed each cycle. It is the price of a variety that came out of a chance field cross rather than out of a breeding programme run to a fixed generation.

Rust, and what “intermediate” is worth

Anacafe 14 exists in its rust-resistant form because of Hemileia vastatrix. Rust strips the leaves off a coffee tree, the tree stops feeding itself, and the farm stops earning. Arabica has almost no natural defence; the Timor Hybrid’s Robusta half does.

The catalogue rates Anacafe 14’s resistance intermediate — the middle of the scale, and the most common rating in the Catimor family.¹ What the Catimor page documents is that intermediate ratings have not held: Costa Rica 95 and Lempira have both since been confirmed susceptible by scientific evaluation in their own countries, despite nominally intermediate ratings.

No such downgrade has been recorded for Anacafe 14 in anything read here. But the family’s history is the relevant context, and rust is a living organism under selection pressure. Read “intermediate” as a rating from a moment in time, not a guarantee.

Competition and market record

This is the thin part of the file, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than dressing it up.

ANACAFÉ runs an auction called One of a Kind, coordinated with the Alliance for Coffee Excellence through ACE’s Private Collection Auctions programme. It exists for lots too small to go through Cup of Excellence. The 2023 edition — the third — selected 20 winning lots from 109 submissions, all scoring above 86 points, judged first by a national panel of nine cuppers and then by an international jury, opening at 5.50/lb** and selling at an average of **7.50/lb for total sales of US$72,454.68.⁴ No Anacafe 14 lot appears among those 2023 winners.⁴

To verify — the 90.11-point lot

The best cup-quality evidence for this variety is a 2022 One of a Kind result: a washed Anacafe 14 from El Morito farm, Mataquescuintla, Jalapa, reported as placing second with 90.11 points, behind a Typica at 90.95, with auction bidding opening at US$5/lb. The source is a trade-news article.⁵ That page returned HTTP 403 to automated checks here, so the score could not be confirmed at source, and no official ANACAFÉ 2022 results page was located. Independent corroboration goes as far as the placement and no further: an Australian roaster’s listing for “El Morito | Anacafe-14 Washed” states the coffee was bought at the 2022 One of a Kind auction and refers to it as **lot 2.⁶ So: second place at the 2022 auction has two independent sources pointing the same way; the 90.11 score has one, unconfirmed. No final hammer price and no buyer name were found for the lot.

There is also no variety-wide cupping average, no Cup of Excellence placement, and no flavour-descriptor set from a sensory panel for Anacafe 14 in anything read here. The “Good” catalogue rating is a breeding assessment of a ceiling under ordinary conditions — not a score, and not a promise about any particular bag.

Outside Guatemala

The variety has travelled. The clearest documented example is a lot from Finca La Esperanza in Zentla, Veracruz, Mexico, at 1,300 masl — a farm founded in 1946 by Don Antonio Rincón and Doña Luisa García, whose sons acquired the main processing site in 1970, and now in its third generation under Emmanuel Rincón Vázquez.⁷

The lot is processed anaerobic washed, and the recipe is specific: 96 hours of whole-cherry fermentation in an oxygen-free environment, then flotation in spring water to sort out defects, pulping, a further 24 hours in fermentation tanks, washing, and drying in two stages — 24 hours of sun on patios followed by 56 hours in a mechanical drier at 45 °C.⁷ The importer describes the cup as “winey yet clear acidity, syrupy body and a clean finish,” and says the coffee won the 2023 Yara Championship and was pre-selected for Cup of Excellence Mexico 2023.⁷

Two cautions. This is an importer’s lot page, useful for provenance of that specific coffee and not a general statement about the variety — nothing here says Anacafe 14 is typically fermented this way, and the catalogue gives no processing recommendation at all.¹ And it is a different farm from this wiki’s Finca La Esperanza (Dipilto) in Nicaragua; the name is common.

Why it matters

Anacafe 14 is the counter-example the Catimor family needed. The standard bargain — take rust resistance from the Timor Hybrid, pay for it in the cup — produced a generation of varieties that grow well and taste like a compromise, and it is why “Catimor” reads as a warning on a bag. Crossing back into Pacamara is ANACAFÉ’s answer: keep the resistance, keep the yield, add drought tolerance and very large beans, and recover a Good quality rating in the process.

What it did not recover is genetic stability. So the variety sits in an odd place — good enough to reach an auction table, unstable enough that the farm cannot reproduce it from its own seed. It is a found object that a national institute spent three decades trying to make behave like a bred one, and mostly, but not entirely, succeeded.

Related

• Catimor — the family it belongs to, and the full line-by-line comparison
• Pacamara — the second cross, and the reason this one cups
• Caturra · Timor Hybrid — the Catimor half: the productive dwarf, and the borrowed resistance
• Robusta — the second species behind that resistance
• Lempira · IHCAFE 90 — the Honduran Catimors that show how unusual a “Good” rating is here
• ANACAFÉ — the association that selected and released it
• Guatemala — the origin, its eight regions and its auction record
• Coffee leaf rust — the disease the family was built against
• World Coffee Research — keeper of the catalogue every rating on this page comes from
• Alliance for Coffee Excellence · Cup of Excellence — the auction machinery behind One of a Kind
• Green coffee auctions — how lots like the 2022 El Morito lot are sold
• Washed process · Coffee fermentation — the processing behind the Mexican lot
• Cupping · Coffee scoring — how the quality claims here would have to be settled

Official links

• Official site — World Coffee Research variety catalogue: Anacafe 14
• Official site — ANACAFÉ (Asociación Nacional del Café)
• Official site — ANACAFÉ, One of a Kind auction results

Footnotes

1. World Coffee Research variety catalogue — Anacafe 14 — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³

2. Instagram reel claiming Anacafe 14 was launched in July 2014 — not viewed here; social-media tier, flagged not relied on ↩

3. Variedad de café ANACAFE 14 (Spanish-language training video) — not viewed here; claim carried from the research report behind this note ↩

4. ANACAFÉ — Resultados One of a Kind 2023 — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩²

5. 2022 ‘One of a Kind Guatemala’ Coffee Winners Heading to July 28 Auction — Daily Coffee News — unconfirmed: returned HTTP 403 to automated checks ↩

6. Pablo & Rusty’s — El Morito, Anacafe-14 Washed — search-result listing only; the page returned HTTP 429 and was not read directly ↩

7. InterAmerican Coffee — Mexico Finca La Esperanza Anacafe 14 Anaerobic Washed — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩² ↩³