Arara

Arara is a Brazilian coffee variety with yellow cherries, released by the research foundation Fundação Procafé in 2012 after roughly fifteen years of selection.¹ It is named after the macaw — arara in Portuguese — for the colour of its fruit.

What makes it worth a page is a combination that is supposed to be rare. Arara is rust-resistant, meaning it carries genes borrowed from Robusta coffee that let it survive Coffee leaf rust, the fungal disease that periodically wipes out Latin American harvests. On this wiki, that ancestry usually comes with a warning about the cup — the Catimor note records a whole family of rust-resistant hybrids with no verified cupping result anywhere. Arara is the counter-example: it has placed in the Brazilian Cup of Excellence, confirmed against the auction record,² and Brazilian trade reporting credits it with a run of national competition wins in the low-to-mid nineties.¹

It is also, like most Brazilian selections, not in the international variety catalogue. World Coffee Research’s Arabica index — the reference database the rest of the specialty industry checks — lists around seventy varieties and has no Arara entry, confirmed directly.³ The same absence is documented on Acaiá and Mundo Novo.

Where it comes from

Arara was not designed. It was found — a plant that appeared on its own in a field of something else, was noticed, and was then selected for fifteen years until it bred true.

Perfect Daily Grind, reporting from Fundação Procafé, describes the origin as a natural cross that appeared in a plantation of Sarchimor 1669-20, most likely with a yellow-fruited neighbour.¹ That places Arara inside the Sarchimor family: Villa Sarchi crossed with the Timor Hybrid, the accidental Arabica × Robusta plant that is the source of nearly all commercial rust resistance. The green-coffee trader Sucafina states the parentage more crisply — Yellow Catuaí × Obatã, Obatã itself being a Timor-derived Brazilian line.⁴ The two accounts point at the same lineage from different distances, because Obatã is a Sarchimor 1669-20 selection.

The practical reading: a yellow Catuaí-type crossed by chance with a rust-resistant Sarchimor line, in Brazil, sometime in the late 1990s. The yellow fruit came from the Catuaí side; the rust resistance came from the Sarchimor side.

To verify

The second parent is not settled, and the two sources do not say the same thing. Perfect Daily Grind, quoting the breeders, calls it a natural cross in a Sarchimor 1669-20 plantation and names yellow Catuaí or yellow Icatu as the likely pollen parent — “likely” being the article’s own word.¹ Sucafina states flatly that Arara is yellow Catuaí × Obatã.⁴ Those are compatible only if you assume the Sarchimor 1669-20 material in question was Obatã and the partner was Catuaí rather than Icatu. No breeder’s document, cultivar-registry entry or pedigree paper was read here — Fundação Procafé’s own cultivar page for Arara returned HTTP 404,⁵ the same failure this wiki records on IAPAR 59 and the Fundação Procafé note itself. Say “a natural cross in the Sarchimor family, usually given as yellow Catuaí × Obatã” — do not print a pedigree.

To verify

2012 and “fifteen years” both rest on one readable source. Perfect Daily Grind states Arara was launched in 2012 by Fundação Procafé after about 15 years of study, and that page was read directly here.¹ A roaster article (XLIII Coffee) makes the same claim independently, but returned HTTP 403 and could not be checked.⁶ Nobody has shown this wiki whether 2012 is a formal registration in Brazil’s national cultivar registry (MAPA) or an internal release announcement — the sources say only “launched.” No registry number is asserted on this page because none was seen.

What the plant is like

There is no catalogue table to print, because the catalogue has no entry.³ What follows is what two sources independently describe, and they agree closely.

Trait	Arara	How well established
Country	Brazil	Confirmed — every record is Brazilian
Genetic family	Sarchimor / Timor-derived	Both sources14
Cherry colour	Yellow	Both sources14
Bean size	Large	Both sources14
Stature	Compact, easy to harvest	Both sources14
Yield	High	Both sources14
Coffee leaf rust	Resistant	Both sources14
Bacterial blight, phoma leaf spot	Resistant	Perfect Daily Grind only1
Drought	Tolerant of water deficit	Perfect Daily Grind only1
Harvest rain	Copes better than most	Perfect Daily Grind only1
Ripening	Slow / late	Perfect Daily Grind only1
Cup quality	High potential; no formal rating exists	Trade description + competition results

Two of those rows are worth pulling out.

Slow ripening is the quality argument. The breeders’ explanation, as reported, is that late maturation gives the fruit longer to accumulate sugars and other compounds, so the cup comes out more complex.¹ The same article immediately qualifies it: sensory notes are “more influenced by the environment than by plant genetics.”¹ That is an unusually honest thing for a breeding foundation to say about its own variety, and it matches what this wiki records under Terroir — the plant sets a ceiling, the farm decides where under it you land.

Rain tolerance is a Brazilian trait for a Brazilian problem. Brazil dries most of its coffee whole in the fruit (Natural process) or with the skin removed and the sticky mucilage left on (Pulped natural), both of which depend on a dry harvest. A variety that shrugs off rain at picking time is solving a problem that barely exists in a washed origin.

The competition record

This is the part that separates Arara from the rest of the rust-resistant catalogue, and it needs splitting into what is confirmed and what is reported.

Confirmed. At the 2019 Cup of Excellence Brazil, an Arara lot placed 16th of 27 winners, checked directly against the Alliance for Coffee Excellence results page:²

Rank	Farm	Region	Variety	Process	Score	Price	Lot	Buyer
16	Fazenda Sertãozinho	Sul de Minas	Arara	Natural	88.04	$10.60/lb	925.96 lb / $9,815.18	Ecom Japan Limited

That is a mid-table placing at a modest price — the same shape as Acaiá’s single 2019 placing, and in the same auction. It is nonetheless more than Catimor has ever produced.

Checked the same way, no Arara lot placed in the 2023 Cup of Excellence Brazil; that year’s winners were Gesha, Catucaí selections, Paraíso 2, SL28, Starmaya, Yellow and Red Catuaí, Yellow Bourbon and Catiguá.⁷ One placing in the two Brazilian years examined here is the honest count.

Reported, not confirmed. The larger claim in circulation runs through the BSCA’s own quality competition rather than Cup of Excellence, and it is where the mid-nineties numbers come from.

To verify

The BSCA results are cited to one article and were not checked against BSCA’s own records. Perfect Daily Grind reports that an Arara from Fazenda Sertãozinho (Botelhos, Minas Gerais) won both the wet-processed and dry-processed categories of the 2017 BSCA competition with 94.25 points, and that a pulped natural Arara from the same farm took first place in 2019 with 92.5.¹ Sucafina separately says only that competition Araras “top out at low 90s cup scores,” without naming an event or a year — consistent in direction, but not an independent confirmation of either number.⁴ The BSCA’s own results archive was not opened here, and the exact category names (“wet” and “dry” processing) are the article’s wording, not BSCA’s. Treat 94.25 and 92.5 as reported.

There is also a scoring puzzle worth noticing rather than resolving: the same farm, Fazenda Sertãozinho, appears in the confirmed 2019 Cup of Excellence table above at 88.04, and in the reported 2019 BSCA result at 92.5. Different competitions, different lots, different juries and different scales in practice — but anyone quoting “Arara scores 92+” should know that the number checkable against an auction record is 88.04. See Coffee scoring on why cross-competition comparisons do not hold.

To verify

The seed-demand figure is striking and single-sourced. Perfect Daily Grind quotes Fundação Procafé saying “60% of our seed requests at the Fundação Procafé are for Arara.”¹ If accurate, that would make Arara the most-requested variety on the books of one of Brazil’s main seed sources — a large claim about national planting trends resting on one quoted sentence, with no year attached and no published figure behind it. The foundation’s own site is not machine-readable, as the Fundação Procafé note documents at length, so it could not be checked.

Where it turns up in the trade

Arara is sold as a named variety by mainstream green-coffee importers, which is itself a signal — most Brazilian selections disappear into blends without ever being printed on a bag.

The one offering confirmed at source is Gavião Arara Natural, sold by Sucafina in North America: producer Carlos Henrique Santana Máximo and family, farms Gavião and Acalanto near Patrocínio in the Cerrado Mineiro demarcated region, 834–890 metres, 20 hectares with 14 in coffee, natural, graded screen 15+ NY2, harvested May–September.⁴ No cupping score is published for the lot.

Two things about that listing are worth reading properly. 834–890 m is low by specialty standards — but as the Mundo Novo and Acaiá notes explain, Brazil’s coffee belt sits lower than Central America’s, and the Cerrado’s cool nights do work that altitude does elsewhere. And screen 15+ NY2 is a size-and-defect grade, not a taste grade: it says the beans are large and clean, which is exactly the large-bean trait both sources attribute to the variety. See Green coffee grading.

To verify

Three further Arara lots appear in the research behind this note, none opened at source:

• “Primavera Arara Fermented Natural” listed by Ally Coffee — producer Ricardo Tavares, Fazenda Primavera, Chapada de Minas. No altitude, score or price published.⁸ The fermentation protocol is not specified, so “fermented natural” says nothing about duration, vessel or whether yeast was added — see Anaerobic fermentation. Note that a Fazenda Primavera in Chapada de Minas also appears in the confirmed 2019 Cup of Excellence table on the Catuaí note, under producer Leonardo Montesanto Tavares with a Geisha lot; whether these are the same farm and family was not established here.
• “Café Arara by Coffee++”, a consumer product listed on the review platform Tasting Grounds, given as Fazenda Primavera, Minas Gerais, 1,150 m. That altitude is roughly 300 m above the Sucafina lot’s; a retail listing on a third-party review site is the weakest kind of source for a farm figure.
• Arara Coffees (araracoffees.com), an exporter catalogue naming a grower Laerce Franca Faleiros at Ibiraci, Minas Gerais, in the Alto Mogiana region. The catalogue is headed with the Arara name but does not state that any specific lot is the Arara variety, so the connection is a name, not a fact.

None of these carries a verified score, price or buyer.

The name catches people

Arara is a macaw, and a lot of things are called that. Two collisions are worth knowing before you search:

• “Arara Coffees” is a company name, not a guarantee of the variety. So is “Ara Coffee Growers,” a US business in San Antonio, Texas — the research behind this note found no stated relationship between it and the Arara variety at all, and none is claimed here.
• Arara is also the name of an Indigenous people and language group in Brazil, which is why general searches drift a long way from coffee.

Why it matters

Arara is the strongest single case this wiki has against the specialty industry’s oldest prejudice.

The Coffee leaf rust note states the trade-off plainly: heirloom varieties like Bourbon and Typica cup beautifully and get sick; hybrids carrying Robusta genes survive and cup flatter. Catimor is the reason that became conventional wisdom. But Sarchimor already narrowed the gap — its Parainema selection places in the Honduran Cup of Excellence year after year — and Arara, another Sarchimor descendant, adds a confirmed Brazilian Cup of Excellence placing plus a reported run of national wins in the nineties.

The second lesson is the familiar Brazilian one. A variety that reportedly accounts for 60% of one major foundation’s seed requests, that wins national competitions, and that sits on the offer sheets of global importers has no entry in the reference catalogue the industry uses.³ As Acaiá, Mundo Novo and IPR Alvorada each record from a different angle: Brazilian breeding is commercially enormous and documentarily invisible, because the catalogue was built around varieties that travelled between national research stations, and Brazil’s stayed home.

Related

• Sarchimor · Timor Hybrid · Villa Sarchi — the family and the ancestors its rust resistance comes from
• Catuaí — the yellow-fruited parent it is usually credited to, and the source of its colour
• Catimor — the sibling rust-resistant family with no verified cup record, and the reason Arara’s results are notable
• Parainema — the other Sarchimor selection with real competition placings
• Mundo Novo · Acaiá · IPR Alvorada · IAPAR 59 — the other Brazilian selections this wiki documents, and the same catalogue gap
• Fundação Procafé — the Varginha foundation that released it, and whose records keep failing to load
• Instituto Agronômico · World Coffee Research — Brazil’s other breeding institute, and the catalogue with no Arara entry
• Brazil Specialty Coffee Association — the body whose competition the mid-nineties scores come from
• Cup of Excellence · Alliance for Coffee Excellence · Cup of Excellence records by country — the auction record its one confirmed placing sits in
• Brazil · Cerrado Mineiro — the country and the demarcated region where the confirmed lot is grown
• Sucafina · Ally Coffee — the importers selling it by name
• Coffee leaf rust — the disease it was selected to survive
• Natural process · Pulped natural · Anaerobic fermentation — the processing styles its lots arrive in
• Coffee scoring · Cupping · Green coffee grading — how its scores and its screen-size grade are produced
• Terroir — the point its own breeders make about environment outweighing genetics in the cup

Official links

A variety has no website. The two bodies that hold, or should hold, its record:

• Official site — Fundação Procafé — the foundation that released Arara; its cultivar page for the variety returned HTTP 404 on this pass
• Official site — World Coffee Research Arabica variety catalogue — the industry reference database, confirmed here to contain no Arara entry
• Official site — Brazil Specialty Coffee Association (BSCA) — the association running the competition the reported 94.25 and 92.5 scores come from

Footnotes

1. Perfect Daily Grind — The Arara variety: what is it & why is it popular in Brazil? — read directly here; source of the 2012 release, the ~15 years of research, the Sarchimor 1669-20 natural-cross account, the agronomic traits, the reported BSCA scores and the 60%-of-seed-requests quote ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶ ↩¹⁷ ↩¹⁸ ↩¹⁹

2. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Brazil 2019 results and auction — read directly here; source of the rank-16 Fazenda Sertãozinho Arara lot at 88.04 and $10.60/lb ↩ ↩²

3. World Coffee Research — Arabica variety catalogue index — read directly here; contains no Arara entry, and does list “Obata (Red)” ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. Sucafina North America — Gavião Arara Natural — read directly here; source of the farm, altitude, grade and the yellow Catuaí × Obatã parentage statement ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰

5. Fundação Procafé — Arara cultivar record — requested directly here and returned HTTP 404 ↩

6. XLIII Coffee — What is Arara coffee? Origins, flavour and unique characteristics — requested directly here and returned HTTP 403; could not be used to corroborate the 2012 date ↩

7. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Brazil 2023 results and auction — read directly here; no Arara lot among the winners ↩

8. Ally Coffee — Primavera Arara Fermented Natural — not opened here; reported via this note’s research brief ↩