Catimor

Catimor is not a coffee variety. It is a family name for dozens of separate varieties that all share the same cross: Caturra × Timor Hybrid. The name is a portmanteau of its two parents, and that is genuinely all it means — if someone sells you “a Catimor,” they have told you the pedigree and nothing else.

The point of the cross was surgical. Caturra is a short, dense-planting, high-yielding tree that catches Coffee leaf rust very badly. The Timor Hybrid is a natural Arabica × Robusta accident that carries rust resistance from its Robusta side while still behaving like an Arabica. Breeders put the two together to get Caturra’s productive frame with Timor’s immune system.

The breeding work was initiated at the Centro de Investigação das Ferrugens do Cafeeiro (CIFC) in Portugal — the world’s coffee-rust research centre — and later refined elsewhere, notably at CATIE in Costa Rica around 1978 for the line known as T8667.¹²

In the variety catalogue’s genetic vocabulary, every Catimor is “introgressed” — meaning DNA from another species (Robusta, Coffea canephora) has been bred into Coffea arabica. That single word is why Catimor is treated as a category apart from heirlooms like Bourbon and Typica.

To verify

Retail and blog sources very consistently date Catimor’s creation to 1959, with some accounts specifying 1967 for the first crosses and adding that the hybrids were later tested at Brazil’s Instituto Agronômico (IAC) in Campinas before the Catimor name was adopted.³⁴⁵ The World Coffee Research catalogue entries checked here name CIFC as the originating institution but give no founding year for the group, and 1978 is the earliest date attached to any individual line. The 1959 date appears only in secondary sources that closely echo one another — treat it as trade lore until a CIFC or peer-reviewed record confirms it.

Why the family exists at all

The Catimor cross is the single clearest case of coffee breeding as damage control. Nobody set out to make a more delicious coffee. They set out to make a farm survive.

Rust resistance in coffee runs through genes labelled SH1–SH9. Four come from Arabica itself; four come from Robusta.⁶ Arabica alone could not supply enough of them. The Timor Hybrid was the bridge between the two species, and Catimor is what breeders built once they had it. The parallel family, Sarchimor, is the same idea using Villa Sarchi instead of Caturra as the Arabica parent.

The named selections are the real varieties

Because “Catimor” is a family, the honest unit of comparison is the individual named line. Each was bred by a different national institute, from a different Timor Hybrid accession, for different conditions — and they do not behave alike.

Selection	Parentage	Bred by	Country / released	Rust resistance	Quality at altitude
T8667	Timor Hybrid 832/1 × Caturra	CIFC, then CATIE (~1978)	Costa Rica	Intermediate	Low
T5175	Timor Hybrid 832/1 × Caturra	ICAFE selection, designated by CATIE	Costa Rica — never officially released	Intermediate	Very low
Costa Rica 95	Timor Hybrid 832/1 × Caturra	ICAFE	Costa Rica	Susceptible	Low
Lempira	Timor Hybrid 832/1 × Caturra	IHCAFE	Honduras	Intermediate — but confirmed susceptible in Honduras	Low
IHCAFE 90	Timor Hybrid 832/1 × Caturra	IHCAFE	Honduras	Susceptible	Very low
Oro Azteca	Timor Hybrid 832/1 × Caturra	INIFAP	Mexico, 1995	Intermediate	Good
Anacafe 14	(Timor Hybrid 832/1 × Caturra) × Pacamara	ANACAFÉ	Guatemala, 2014	Intermediate	Good
Catimor 129 (Nyika)	Caturra × Timor Hybrid 1343	Cenicafé line, released by Malawi’s Coffee Research Unit, 2006	Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe	Intermediate	Good

All rows above are from the World Coffee Research variety catalogue.⁷ Note the two different Timor Hybrid accessions — 832/1 and 1343 — which is part of why the family is not uniform.

The two Honduran lines are the ones a buyer is most likely to meet by name, because IHCAFE pushed them out across the country’s smallholder sector. The catalogue is unusually blunt about both. Lempira carries an intermediate resistance rating with the same caveat Costa Rica 95 has — it has since been confirmed susceptible to rust in Honduras. IHCAFE 90 is rated susceptible outright, is “highly susceptible to ojo de gallo” (a fungal leaf-and-berry disease of wet, shaded farms), demands “very high” fertilisation, and rates “very low” for cup quality — the bottom of the catalogue’s scale. The catalogue also notes IHCAFE 90 is highly similar to T5175, which is the same cross under a different institute’s number.

T5175 is a curiosity worth knowing about: ICAFE selected it but never officially released it, and CATIE gave it its number afterwards. It is explicitly the line “adapted to lowest altitudes” in the family, and it rates very low in the cup. A variety bred to survive where nothing else would grow, at the direct cost of everything a specialty buyer is paying for.

Read the last two columns together and the family’s whole story is there. Anacafe 14 was found growing in Chiquimula, Guatemala around 1980, released commercially in 2014, is drought-tolerant, yields very high, and cups well at altitude — but the catalogue warns it is not genetically stable across generations, so a farmer replanting from their own seed does not get the same tree back. Costa Rica 95, meanwhile, has been “confirmed through scientific evaluation to be susceptible to coffee leaf rust in Costa Rica” — a rust-resistance variety that lost its rust resistance.

That last line deserves emphasis. Rust is a living organism and it adapts. Resistance bred in the 1970s is not resistance forever, and the Catimor family is the proof.

To verify

This wiki’s Caturra and Coffee leaf rust notes both describe the Catimor family in flat terms as “rust-resistant”, and the research report behind this note does the same. Against the World Coffee Research catalogue that is too strong: of the eight lines checked here, none rates “high” resistance, six rate intermediate, and Costa Rica 95 and IHCAFE 90 rate susceptible. Worse, the catalogue records that Costa Rica 95 and Lempira have both been confirmed susceptible by scientific evaluation in their own countries despite their nominal ratings. The family was bred for rust resistance; several members no longer reliably deliver it. Prefer the per-selection rating over any blanket “Catimor is rust-resistant” claim, and don’t quote a resistance level for the group as a whole.

What the plant is like

Across the selections, the agronomic profile is remarkably consistent — because they all inherit it from Caturra.

Trait	Typical Catimor
Stature	Dwarf / compact
Yield potential	High (Anacafe 14: high to very high)
Planting density	5,000–6,000 plants/ha, single-stem pruning (IHCAFE 90: 4,000–5,000)
Nutrition requirement	High (IHCAFE 90: very high)
Nematodes	Susceptible — to both Meloidogyne and Pratylenchus
Coffee berry disease	Susceptible (exception: Catimor 129, resistant)
Coffee leaf rust	Intermediate to susceptible — varies by line
Optimal altitude	Roughly 1,000–1,600 m at the equator, 700–1,300 m at mid latitudes, 400–1,000 m above 15°

Figures from the World Coffee Research entries for T8667, T5175, Costa Rica 95, Lempira, IHCAFE 90, Oro Azteca, Anacafe 14 and Catimor 129.^{1891011121314}

Two practical readings. First, hungry trees: like Caturra, Catimor packs 5,000–6,000 plants into a hectare and needs heavy fertilising to sustain it — a variety that rewards capital and punishes farms without it. Second, warm and low is fine: T8667 and Oro Azteca are both explicitly recommended for acidic, aluminium-rich soils and warm zones, which is exactly the ground where an heirloom Arabica struggles. Catimor’s real territory is the marginal farm, not the trophy block.

Catimor 129 is the outlier worth knowing: it sits at 3,000–4,000 plants/ha, wants >1,600 m, fruits by year 2, is resistant to coffee berry disease — the catalogue notes only one of five introduced Catimor lines showed that — and needs careful management to stop it overbearing.

To verify

A widely repeated agronomy claim conflicts with the catalogue. A roaster-published agronomic summary states Catimor performs optimally at 700–1,000 m and that both very low and very high altitudes are unfavourable, and assigns 600–900 m with rainfall above 3,000 mm/year to a line it calls “Catimor T-5269”.¹⁵ Two problems. First, the World Coffee Research bands for every Catimor line checked here run 1,000–1,600 m near the equator, sliding down to 400–1,000 m only above 15° latitude — a single flat “700–1,000 m” figure ignores that latitude adjustment entirely. Second, there is no T5269 record in the World Coffee Research catalogue — the slug returns HTTP 404. The likely explanation is a transposition of T5296, which does exist and is a Sarchimor, not a Catimor. Do not repeat “Catimor T-5269” as a real line. The same source’s note that new Catimor leaves emerge reddish-brown is plausible bronze-tip leaf colour but was not confirmed against the catalogue, which records leaf tip colour per variety.

What it tastes like

This is where the family’s reputation lives, and it is genuinely mixed.

The catalogue’s verdict on the older lines is blunt, and the more of them you check the blunter it gets. T8667, Costa Rica 95 and Lempira all rate “Low” quality potential at high altitude. T5175 and IHCAFE 90 rate “Very low” — the actual bottom of the scale. That is five of the eight lines documented here sitting at or below “Low.” But Oro Azteca, Anacafe 14 and Catimor 129 all rate “Good”, the same rating Caturra itself receives.

So the honest statement is not “Catimor tastes bad,” and it is also not “Catimor got better.” It is that the family splits cleanly in two. The bulk of what was planted — the 1970s–80s workhorses that went into Costa Rica and Honduras by the million — cups Low to Very Low, and that is the coffee most people mean when they say the word. The later, deliberately quality-selected lines (Oro Azteca 1995, Anacafe 14 2014) reach “Good.” Both statements are true at once, and which one applies depends entirely on which tree is in the ground.

To verify

Roaster- and retail-facing sources describe Catimor cups as nutty, herbal, cherry, berry, bright fruit, mild acidity, smooth body, while the same body of sources simultaneously calls the variety’s quality “inconsistent” and “controversial”. These are marketing descriptors, not cupping data. No cupping score, competition result, auction price or buyer record for any Catimor lot was found or verified here — not one. If you need a number, the only defensible figures are World Coffee Research’s four-step quality ratings in the table above.

To verify

A caffeine claim worth flagging because it keeps getting quoted. A retail-tier explainer reports Catimor varieties at 1.40–2.16% caffeine against 0.82–1.50% for “pure Arabica,” attributing the figures to studies in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.¹⁶ The direction is at least mechanistically plausible — Robusta carries roughly double Arabica’s caffeine, and every Catimor has Robusta ancestry through the Timor Hybrid. But the underlying journal papers were not located or read here, no second independent source was found, and the source gives no citation detail, sample size or method. Treat the specific percentages as unverified. Do not present them as measured Catimor caffeine content.

There is one negative result worth stating plainly. This wiki’s Sarchimor note checked the Cup of Excellence Honduras results for 2023 and 2024 against the Alliance for Coffee Excellence’s own published tables — the sibling family’s Parainema placed six times across those two years, at 87.3–88.1 points and US$8–17 a pound. In the same two competitions, in the country where Lempira and IHCAFE 90 are planted most heavily, no lot labelled Lempira, IHCAFE 90 or plain Catimor placed at all.¹⁷ That is not proof the family cannot cup. It is the closest thing to evidence anyone has, and it points one way.

2025 adds one qualifier. In that year’s Honduran competition — 28 placing lots across three categories — a single Catimor did make the table: IHCAFE 90 from Los Cipreses, seventh in the Traditional category, 87.44 points at $15.10/lb, the joint-lowest price paid in that category.¹⁸ So a Catimor can place. Lempira, the family’s most heavily planted line in the country, still did not appear in any of the three years checked.

Peru 2019 overturns the conclusion outright. The evidence above is Honduran, and Honduras is not the whole world. The top lot of the Cup of Excellence Perú 2019 auction was a washed Costa Rica 95 from La Lucuma, Cajamarca — producer Grimanes Morales Lizana — scoring 92.28 and selling at $20.00/lb, ahead of a Geisha/Bourbon blend at 91.44.¹⁹²⁰ That is not a placing; it is a national win, by the family’s worst-rated released line, over the varieties that normally take these competitions. A Low quality-potential rating describes a ceiling under ordinary conditions, and it is clearly not a prohibition. See Costa Rica 95 for the full record.

Where it is actually grown

Catimor is one of the most widely planted coffee groups on earth, and almost none of it reaches a specialty shelf under its own name. The catalogue entries checked here place named selections in Costa Rica, Honduras, Mexico, Guatemala, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe, and identify Catimor 129 as having travelled from Colombia to Kenya in the 1970s, into Malawi in the 1990s, and into official release in 2006 under an EU-funded replanting programme.

Honduras is the country where the family’s reach is most visible. IHCAFE bred and released two Catimors of its own — Lempira and IHCAFE 90 — into what is now Central America’s largest coffee producer by volume. Both are high-yielding, both are rated Low or Very Low in the cup, and both have run into the disease they were built to resist. That is the Catimor bargain at national scale: a smallholder sector that stayed in business, planted almost entirely with coffee no specialty buyer will pay up for.

To verify

The research report behind this note states Catimor was first introduced to Brazil in 1970 and spread through Latin America from there. No primary breeding-programme document, CIFC record or catalogue entry corroborating that date was found here, and the report itself flags it as uncorroborated. Note that this wiki’s Timor Hybrid note records a separate, differently-sourced claim that HdT germplasm reached Brazil in 1976 — a different plant and a different event, but close enough in date that the two are easy to confuse. Treat 1970 as trade lore.

To verify

Secondary sources uniformly describe Catimor as the backbone of arabica production in Vietnam, and as widely planted across Indonesia — where Sweet Maria’s reportedly records “Ateng” or “CatimorAteng” as the common Sumatran name for these coffees — plus India and much of Central and South America.²¹²²²³ The Sweet Maria’s glossary page blocked automated access (HTTP 403), so the “Ateng” naming is reported second-hand and unconfirmed.²⁴ No production statistic for Catimor in Vietnam or Indonesia was verified against an official source here.

Why it matters to specialty coffee

Catimor is the variety specialty coffee argues about.²⁵²⁶²⁷ It is the reason a great many farms still have trees at all, and it is also the reason a great many origins are stuck selling coffee that nobody will pay a premium for. The trade-off named in the Coffee leaf rust note lands here more heavily than anywhere: heirlooms cup better and get sick; introgressed hybrids stay alive and cup flatter.

What the catalogue data shows is a trade-off that has narrowed without closing. The first generation — T8667, T5175, Costa Rica 95, Lempira, IHCAFE 90 — traded cup quality away, and in three documented cases eventually lost the resistance it was traded for. That is the worst possible outcome of the bargain, and it happened at national scale in two countries. The newer lines — Oro Azteca, Anacafe 14 — hold “Good” quality ratings while keeping intermediate resistance, and they are the reason blanket dismissals of “Catimor” are out of date as a statement about breeding.

They are not yet out of date as a statement about what is planted. Five of the eight catalogued lines here still rate Low or Very Low, and those are the ones that went into the ground by the million. The direction of travel is real; the inventory has not caught up with it.

Related

• Caturra — the dwarf Arabica parent, and where the productivity comes from
• Timor Hybrid — the Arabica × Robusta parent, and where the rust resistance comes from
• Robusta — the second species behind that parent, and the original source of the resistance genes
• Sarchimor — the sibling family, built on Villa Sarchi instead of Caturra
• Castillo — Colombia’s Catimor-type, the variety that replaced Caturra nationally
• Anacafe 14 — the Guatemalan Catimor × Pacamara selection
• Lempira · IHCAFE 90 — the two Honduran selections, and the family’s largest single national footprint
• T5175 — the unreleased Costa Rican line bred for the lowest altitudes
• Parainema — the Sarchimor that does what no Catimor has done at Cup of Excellence
• Coffee leaf rust — the disease the whole family was built to survive
• Bourbon · Typica — the susceptible heirlooms Catimor exists as an answer to
• Catuaí · Mundo Novo — Caturra’s other descendants, bred for yield rather than resistance
• World Coffee Research — keeper of the variety catalogue every figure here comes from
• CATIE · Cenicafé · ICAFE · IHCAFE · ANACAFÉ · INIFAP · CIFC · Instituto Agronômico — the institutes that bred and released the named selections
• Alliance for Coffee Excellence — publisher of the competition results checked against this family
• Cupping · Coffee scoring — how the quality claims above would have to be settled

Official links

• Official site — World Coffee Research variety catalogue
• Official site — World Coffee Research variety record: T8667 (Catimor)
• Official site — World Coffee Research
• Official site — Centro de Investigação das Ferrugens do Cafeeiro (CIFC), the institute that made the original crosses

There is no single “Catimor” record in the catalogue — the group is documented only through its named selections. A request for /varieties/catimor returns 404.

Footnotes

1. World Coffee Research — T8667 (Catimor) ↩ ↩²

2. Centro de Investigação das Ferrugens do Cafeeiro (CIFC) — Instituto Superior de Agronomia, University of Lisbon ↩

3. Ozone Coffee — Catimor: the controversial superhero ↩

4. Catimor Coffee — What is Catimor coffee and why was it created? ↩

5. Coffee About — Catimor coffee variety ↩

6. Molecular Plant Pathology — The coffee leaf rust pathogen Hemileia vastatrix ↩

7. World Coffee Research — variety catalogue ↩

8. World Coffee Research — Costa Rica 95 ↩

9. World Coffee Research — Anacafe 14 ↩

10. World Coffee Research — Oro Azteca ↩

11. World Coffee Research — Catimor 129 ↩

12. World Coffee Research — Lempira ↩

13. World Coffee Research — IHCAFE 90 ↩

14. World Coffee Research — T5175 ↩

15. Cofmos — Catimor agronomic profile ↩

16. Acquired Coffee — The Catimor coffee cultivar ↩

17. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Cup of Excellence Honduras results ↩

18. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Cup of Excellence Honduras 2025 results and auction — confirmed via WebFetch ↩

19. Cup of Excellence — Perú 2019 results — confirmed via WebFetch ↩

20. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Cup of Excellence Perú 2019 auction results — confirmed via WebFetch ↩

21. Nguyen Coffee Supply — The history of Vietnamese Catimor coffee ↩

22. Helena Coffee — What is Catimor coffee? History and features ↩

23. Types Coffee — Catimor coffee beans: history, properties, taste ↩

24. Sweet Maria’s Coffee Library — Catimor glossary entry ↩

25. Coffee & Tea Culture — Catimor: the rust-resistant variety family ↩

26. Ratiocraft — Catimor: the controversial workhorse ↩

27. Coffeester — Catimor ↩