Costa Rica 95

Costa Rica 95 — often written CR95 — is a coffee variety bred in Costa Rica by the national coffee institute ICAFE. It belongs to the Catimor family: Caturra crossed with the Timor Hybrid, the natural Arabica–Robusta cross that carries resistance to Coffee leaf rust. Its parentage in the World Coffee Research catalogue is Timor Hybrid 832/1 × Caturra, and ICAFE arrived at it by pedigree selection — sowing a cross, keeping the best offspring, sowing those, and repeating until the line breeds true.¹

On paper it is one of the least appealing varieties in specialty coffee’s vocabulary. The catalogue rates its cup quality Low at high altitude, and it is one of only two lines in the whole Catimor family that the catalogue marks susceptible to leaf rust outright — the disease the family exists to survive.¹

Then it won a Cup of Excellence. See The lot that should not exist.

What the catalogue says

Every row below was read directly from the World Coffee Research catalogue entry for Costa Rica 95.¹

Genetic group	Introgressed (Catimor-related) — carries Robusta DNA
Parentage	Timor Hybrid 832/1 × Caturra
Bred by	ICAFE, Costa Rica
Breeding method	Pedigree selection
Stature	Dwarf / compact
Leaf tip colour	Bronze
Bean size	Average
Yield potential	High
Quality potential at high altitude	Low
Coffee leaf rust	Low resistance / susceptible — confirmed by scientific evaluation in Costa Rica
Ojo de gallo	Susceptible
Nematodes	Susceptible
Coffee berry disease	Susceptible
Nutrition requirement	High
Planting density	5,000–6,000 plants/ha, single-stem pruning
First production	Year 3
Optimal altitude	1,000–1,600 m near the equator; 700–1,300 m at 5–15° latitude; 400–1,000 m above 15°
Recommended for	The warmest zones, and acidic soils rich in aluminium

“Introgressed” is the catalogue’s word for a coffee that has had DNA from another species — Robusta, Coffea canephora — bred into it. That single word is why Costa Rica 95 is filed apart from heirlooms like Bourbon and Typica, and it is also the source of everything the variety was supposed to be good at.

Read the last row carefully, because it is the whole design brief. Aluminium-rich acidic soils and the warmest zones are the ground where an heirloom Arabica sulks — low, hot, chemically hostile land. Costa Rica 95 was never aimed at the trophy block. It was aimed at the parts of a farm that were not otherwise going to produce coffee, and it was expected to produce a lot of it.

The one place it lags its relatives is patience: first production in year 3, where the Honduran Catimors Lempira and IHCAFE 90 both fruit in year 2.¹ For a farmer replanting after a rust outbreak, that extra year is a real cost.

To verify — the year, and what the "95" means

The catalogue gives no release year for Costa Rica 95 at all.¹ The obvious reading of the name — selected or released in 1995 — is an inference and nothing more; the research behind this note could not find it stated in any primary ICAFE publication, and no original ICAFE breeding document confirming the Timor Hybrid 832/1 × Caturra pedigree was located either. World Coffee Research appears to be summarising official breeding records it holds, but the underlying record is not public. Do not state 1995 as the release year. The defensible statement is “the 1990s,” which is when secondary sources agree the variety was being planted at scale.

The rust story, and how it ended

Costa Rica 95 exists because of Hemileia vastatrix. Rust strips a coffee tree’s leaves, the tree stops feeding itself, and the farm stops earning. Arabica has almost no natural defence; the Timor Hybrid’s Robusta half does. Every Catimor is an attempt to bolt that defence onto a productive Arabica frame, and Costa Rica 95 was ICAFE’s version of the attempt.

It did not hold. The catalogue now rates the variety’s rust resistance low/susceptible, and states plainly that Costa Rica 95 “has been confirmed through scientific evaluation to be susceptible to coffee leaf rust in Costa Rica,” with possible susceptibility elsewhere in Central America.¹ It is also susceptible to ojo de gallo — “rooster’s eye,” Mycena citricolor, the fungus that spots and drops leaves on wet, heavily shaded farms — which was the second disease it was meant to shrug off.

So the bargain was struck and then unstruck. Costa Rican growers traded cup quality for a tree that would survive rust, and the tree stopped surviving rust. This is not a Costa Rica 95 failure so much as a family one: the Catimor page documents the same ending for Lempira and IHCAFE 90, and the Coffee leaf rust page explains why it keeps happening. Rust is a living organism under selection pressure. Resistance bred in one decade is not resistance in the next.

Within the family, Costa Rica 95’s closest relative is Lempira — the catalogue calls the two “highly similar,” which is unsurprising given they are the same written cross made by two different national institutes, and both were later confirmed susceptible in their own countries.

What it tastes like

The catalogue’s verdict is Low quality potential at high altitude — the second-lowest step on a four-step scale.¹ For comparison, Caturra, the Arabica parent it descends from, rates Good; IHCAFE 90 and T5175 rate Very low. Costa Rica 95 sits in the lower half of an already unglamorous family.

That rating is a breeding assessment, not a cupping score, and it is worth being exact about what it claims. It says the variety’s ceiling under ordinary growing conditions is low. It does not say every Costa Rica 95 lot is bad coffee — and the Peru result below is the clearest evidence in this wiki that the two are different statements.

To verify — the flavour descriptors and the full-sun history

The research report behind this note draws its cup-quality and planting history from Sweet Maria’s coffee library, which describes Costa Rica 95 as having “medium to low” cup quality with “harsh and unbalanced flavors” typical of some Catimors, and says the variety was originally bred for resistance to both rust and ojo de gallo but is now reported susceptible to both.² The same source is the origin of the claim that Costa Rica 95 was planted heavily in full sun, without shade trees, across Costa Rica in the 1990s and early 2000s, in an environmentally aggressive, volume-first style that made it controversial among specialty buyers. None of that was independently confirmed here. It is one retailer-published source; Sweet Maria’s glossary pages have returned HTTP 403 to automated checks elsewhere in this wiki, so the wording is reported second-hand. The disease half of the claim is corroborated by the catalogue;¹ the flavour descriptors and the monoculture history are not corroborated by anything, and no hectarage or share-of-national-production figure for Costa Rica 95 was found in any source.

The lot that should not exist

On 5 December 2019, the top lot of the Cup of Excellence Perú auction was a Costa Rica 95.

Competition	Cup of Excellence Perú 2019
Rank	1st (split as lots 1a and 1b)
Farm	La Lucuma
Producer	Grimanes Morales Lizana
Region	Cajamarca, Peru
Variety	Costa Rica 95
Process	Washed
Score	92.28
Price	20.00/lb** (lot 1a) · **19.80/lb (lot 1b)
Auction value	7,936.60** (1a) · **8,381.14 (1b)
Buyers	Maruyama Coffee, Uchida Coffee, Harrods, Goodboybob Coffee (1a); Dabov Specialty Coffee, Coffee Me Up, Cupper’s High Coffee Company, Cuppingpost (1b)

Both the Cup of Excellence results table and the Alliance for Coffee Excellence auction record were read directly for this.³⁴ The 2019 Peruvian auction sold 21 lots, 19,812 lb in total, for 216,396.20** at an average of **10.92/lb.⁴

Three things are worth pulling out of that table.

It beat the varieties that normally win. Second place, at 91.44, was a washed Geisha/Bourbon blend from Cusco; third, at 91.40, a washed Catuaí from Cajamarca.³ A variety the catalogue rates Low was scored above both, blind, by an international jury.

92.28 is a very high number. It is more than a point and a half above every Peruvian COE winner this wiki has recorded since — 90.74 in 2023, 90.54 in 2024, 90.64 in 2025, all of them Geisha-led lots from the same department.³ On score alone, the 2019 Costa Rica 95 is the best Peruvian coffee in the Cup of Excellence records by country ledger.

The money did not follow the score. $20.00/lb is a good price and an ordinary one — roughly a quarter of what Peru’s 2023 and 2025 winners fetched at nearly two points lower. The buyers were serious names, Maruyama Coffee and Harrods among them, and they still paid a quarter of Geisha money for a higher score. That gap is the Premiumisation argument in a single auction line: what a lot sells for is set by the story on the bag at least as much as by the cup in front of the judge, and “Catimor” is not a story anyone has learned to pay for.

This result also corrects something this wiki said. The Catimor and IHCAFE 90 pages concluded, from three years of Honduran results, that the family had effectively never placed at Cup of Excellence and that a single 7th-place IHCAFE 90 lot in 2025 was the exception. Peru 2019 is a stronger counterexample by a wide margin — not a placing, a win — and the Honduran-only evidence should not be read as a verdict on the whole family.

To verify — the retailer story attached to this lot

A specialty coffee seller marketing the La Lucuma lot adds a farm narrative that is not corroborated anywhere primary.⁵ It claims the farm found a variety it called “Lalúcuma” in 1997; that in 2011 a disease locally called “ojo de pollo” (almost certainly ojo de gallo) killed every variety on the plantation except that one; and that the survivor, locally called “MARSHELL,” is what is now known as Costa Rica 95. No varietal registry, ICAFE record or World Coffee Research entry links the name “Marshell” to Costa Rica 95,¹ and the dates come from a single retail storytelling page. Treat all of it as farm lore. The same page lists a “CVA Score” of 90.95, which is not the official competition figure — the Cup of Excellence score for this lot is 92.28³ — and claims the lot was “the only champion in COE competitions” for the variety, which is marketing language, not a checkable record. Its one claim that does hold up is the price: the stated 44 per kilogram** is simply the confirmed **20.00/lb converted.⁴⁵ Altitude of 1,600–1,800 m, volcanic soil, Leucaena and Erythrina shade trees and an annual farm output of 10,000 kg all come from the same page and are unverified.

Why it matters

Costa Rica 95 is the Catimor bargain in its purest form, and it is worth holding both halves of it at once.

The bargain failed on its own terms. ICAFE bred a hungry, dense-planting dwarf that would yield heavily on the warmest and sourest ground in the country, accepted a Low cup rating as the price, and then watched the rust resistance it had paid for stop working — confirmed by scientific evaluation, in Costa Rica, on the catalogue’s own page.¹ That is the worst available outcome: the cost was paid and the benefit expired.

And the variety is not what its rating says it is. A blind international jury put a washed Costa Rica 95 from Cajamarca at the top of a national competition, above a Geisha blend, at 92.28 points.³ The honest reading is not that the catalogue is wrong — a quality potential rating describes a ceiling under ordinary conditions, and one exceptional farm at 1,700 m with a careful harvest and clean washed processing is not ordinary conditions. The honest reading is that variety sets the odds and never settles the outcome, and that “it’s a Catimor” is a prediction rather than a verdict.

What the market did with that lot is the harder lesson. The judges rewarded the coffee. The bidders rewarded the name. Only one of those two is supposed to be blind.

Related

• Catimor — the family it belongs to, and the full comparison of every named selection
• Lempira — the Honduran variety the catalogue calls “highly similar,” with the same cross and the same ending
• IHCAFE 90 · T5175 — the rest of the first-generation Catimor cohort, both rated Very low
• Caturra · Timor Hybrid — the two parents: the productive dwarf, and the borrowed resistance
• Robusta — the second species behind that resistance
• ICAFE — the Costa Rican institute that bred it
• CATIE · World Coffee Research — the germplasm collection and the catalogue every rating here comes from
• Coffee leaf rust — the disease it was bred against and lost to
• Sarchimor · Anacafe 14 · Castillo — the later, better-cupping answers to the same problem
• Cup of Excellence · Alliance for Coffee Excellence — the competition it won in 2019, and the body that published the auction
• Peru · Cup of Excellence records by country — where that win sits in the national and global ledgers
• Geisha · Catuaí — the varieties it beat in Peru 2019
• Maruyama Coffee — the Japanese roaster that bought part of the winning lot
• Washed process — how the winning lot was processed
• Cupping · Coffee scoring — how the quality claims here would have to be settled
• Premiumisation · C-market — why a 92.28 Catimor still sold for a quarter of Geisha money

Official links

• Official site — World Coffee Research variety catalogue: Costa Rica 95
• Official site — World Coffee Research
• Official site — ICAFE (Instituto del Café de Costa Rica) — unconfirmed: the site has returned a TLS certificate error to checks elsewhere in this wiki, so nothing here rests on ICAFE’s own pages
• Official results — Cup of Excellence Perú 2019

Footnotes

1. World Coffee Research variety catalogue — Costa Rica 95 — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰

2. Sweet Maria’s Coffee Library — Costa Rica 95 / CR95 variety ↩

3. Cup of Excellence — Perú 2019 results — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

4. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Cup of Excellence Perú 2019 auction results — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩² ↩³

5. Vela Ethan — Lululala / Costa Rica 95 / Washed product page ↩ ↩²