IHCAFE 90

IHCAFE 90 is a coffee variety bred in Honduras by the national coffee institute IHCAFE. It belongs to the Catimor family — Caturra crossed with the Timor Hybrid, the natural Arabica–Robusta cross that carries resistance to Coffee leaf rust — and its parentage in the World Coffee Research catalogue is recorded as Timor Hybrid 832/1 × Caturra.¹

It is the variety IHCAFE built for the bottom of the mountain. Where most Central American breeding aims at the altitudes where good coffee grows, IHCAFE 90 was selected to yield heavily in warm, low, marginal ground — and the catalogue rates its cup quality “Very low,” the actual floor of the scale.¹ It is, on paper, one of the least promising varieties in specialty coffee’s vocabulary.

Which makes its one competition result all the more worth knowing about. See The one lot below.

What the catalogue says

Every row is from the World Coffee Research catalogue entry for IHCAFE 90, read directly.¹

Genetic group	Introgressed (Catimor-related) — carries Robusta DNA
Parentage	Timor Hybrid 832/1 × Caturra
Bred by	IHCAFE, Honduras
Stature	Dwarf / compact
Leaf tip colour	Dark bronze
Bean size	Average
Yield potential	High
Quality potential at high altitude	Very low
Coffee leaf rust	Susceptible — confirmed in Honduras by scientific evaluation
Ojo de gallo	Highly susceptible
Nematodes	Susceptible
Coffee berry disease	Susceptible
Nutrition requirement	Very high
Planting density	4,000–5,000 plants/ha, single-stem pruning
First production	Year 2
Optimal altitude	1,000–1,600 m near the equator; 700–1,300 m at 5–15° latitude; 400–1,000 m above 15°

Two entries in that table are unusual even by Catimor standards. “Very high” nutrition is a step above the “high” rating its sibling Lempira and most of the family carry — this tree eats more than its relatives. And “highly susceptible to Ojo de Gallo” is the catalogue reaching for an intensifier it does not often use. Ojo de gallo — “rooster’s eye,” Mycena citricolor — is the fungus that spots and drops leaves on wet, heavily shaded farms, which is precisely the kind of farm a warm lowland zone tends to be.

Where it came from

IHCAFE made IHCAFE 90 by pedigree selection — sowing a cross, picking the best offspring, sowing those, and repeating until the line breeds true.¹ The starting material was not its own.

The catalogue’s entry for T5175 — a Costa Rican Catimor that ICAFE selected but never officially released — states plainly: “In Honduras, additional selection of T5175 led to the creation of IHCAFE 90 and Lempira.”² So both Honduran Catimors are downstream of the same unreleased Costa Rican line, which is itself Timor Hybrid 832/1 × Caturra. The IHCAFE 90 entry adds that the variety is “highly similar to T5175”,¹ and the two share the same defining trait: T5175 is the family’s line adapted to the lowest altitudes, and it too rates very low in the cup.² IHCAFE 90 is, in effect, Honduras’s released version of a coffee Costa Rica decided not to release.

To verify — the pedigree base, and a conflict with the Lempira page

The Lempira note flags an open question: whether IHCAFE selected its two Catimors out of the T8667 line, as a Honduran project document claims, or made its own cross. The catalogue’s T5175 page answers it differently again, naming T5175 as the material both varieties were selected from.² All three routes produce the same written pedigree — T8667, T5175 and the Honduran lines are all Timor Hybrid 832/1 × Caturra — so nothing here contradicts the parentage. But which physical line IHCAFE worked from is recorded inconsistently across sources, and the T5175 statement is the better-provenanced of the two. No IHCAFE or PROMECAFE breeding record was read here.

To verify — the year, and what the "90" means

The World Coffee Research catalogue gives no release year for IHCAFE 90 at all.¹ The obvious reading of the name — released or selected in 1990 — is an inference, and the research report behind this note explicitly could not confirm it in any primary source. The only dated statement found here is Perfect Daily Grind’s Honduran varieties survey, which says IHCAFE “created two new varieties in the nineties: IHCAFE 90 and Lempira.”³ That is one secondary source, it brackets a decade rather than a year, and it groups IHCAFE 90 with Lempira — which this wiki dates to the mid-to-late 1990s. Do not state 1990 as the release year. The defensible statement is “the 1990s.”

What it is like to farm

The agronomic logic is coherent, and it is entirely about volume. IHCAFE 90 is short, so it can be picked without ladders and planted densely. It starts producing in its second year, which for a smallholder replanting after a rust outbreak is the difference between one lean season and three.¹ Perfect Daily Grind describes it as “capable of producing high yields that ripen early.”³ It tolerates the warm, low ground where an heirloom Arabica sulks.

The bill comes in two parts. First, fertiliser: a “very high” nutrition rating means the yield on paper is only reachable by a farm that can buy inputs, and IHCAFE’s own Bono Cafetalero fertiliser subsidy — reaching more than 91,000 producers — exists partly because varieties like this one made it necessary. Second, disease: the catalogue marks IHCAFE 90 susceptible to rust, to nematodes, to coffee berry disease, and highly susceptible to ojo de gallo.¹ There is no column in which it is protected.

Note the density figure, which is the one place IHCAFE 90 departs from the family pattern: 4,000–5,000 plants per hectare, against the 5,000–6,000 that Caturra, Lempira and most Catimors carry.¹ A slightly roomier planting for a slightly hungrier tree.

The rust story

IHCAFE 90 exists because of Hemileia vastatrix. Rust defoliates 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. Every Catimor is an attempt to bolt that defence onto a productive Arabica frame, and IHCAFE 90 was Honduras’s low-altitude version of the attempt.

It did not hold. The catalogue rates IHCAFE 90’s rust resistance as low/susceptible outright, and records that susceptibility has been confirmed in Honduras through scientific evaluation — adding that it may possibly also be susceptible elsewhere in Central America.¹ That is not a downgrade from “intermediate” pending review, as with Lempira and Costa Rica 95; the variety sits in the susceptible column on its own catalogue page.

So the trade was made and then unmade. Honduran farmers gave up cup quality for a tree that would survive rust, and the tree stopped surviving rust. The Catimor page documents the same ending across the family; the Coffee leaf rust page explains why it keeps happening — the pathogen is a living organism under selection pressure, and resistance bred in one decade is not resistance in the next.

To verify — what Honduran extension actually recommends now, and how much is planted

The research report behind this note concludes that “current agronomic recommendations in Honduras no longer treat IHCAFE 90 as a reliable rust-resistant variety.” That is a reasonable reading of the catalogue’s susceptibility finding, but no IHCAFE extension bulletin, PROMECAFE circular or Honduran government recommendation was read here, and IHCAFE’s own website returned HTTP 403 to automated checks elsewhere in this wiki. Likewise, no verified figure exists here for how much Honduran land is planted to IHCAFE 90 — not a hectarage, not a share of national production. It is named among the country’s common varieties by origin profiles and by Perfect Daily Grind,³ and no more than that.

What it tastes like

The catalogue’s verdict is “Very low” quality potential at high altitude — the bottom step of a four-step scale, shared within the family only with T5175, the line it was selected from.¹² For comparison, Lempira rates “Low,” and Caturra — the Arabica parent both descend from — rates “Good.”

That rating is a breeding assessment, not a cupping score, and it is worth being precise about what it does and does not say. It says that at the altitudes where specialty coffee is grown, this variety’s ceiling is the lowest the catalogue records. It does not say that every IHCAFE 90 lot is bad coffee.

To verify — there is no flavour data

No SCA cupping score, sensory panel result, flavour descriptor set or named buyer for IHCAFE 90 was found in any source read here, apart from the single Cup of Excellence lot below. The research report behind this note reached the same conclusion and flagged it explicitly: the catalogue entry covers agronomy and disease and reports no cup profile. The report also notes that any statement about IHCAFE 90 being typically washed, natural or honey processed is an inference from general Honduran practice — the catalogue gives no variety-specific processing recommendation, and none should be quoted from this page.

The one lot

Honduras has run a Cup of Excellence since 2004, and the Alliance for Coffee Excellence publishes every placing lot with its variety, score and price. Across the years this wiki has checked, lots labelled plainly “Catimor,” “Lempira” or “IHCAFE 90” are almost entirely absent from those tables — the Catimor and Sarchimor pages record no placements at all for any of them in 2023 or 2024.

2025 is the exception, and IHCAFE 90 is the variety that made it.

Farm	Los Cipreses
Producer	Julio García Santos
Category	Traditional Varieties
Rank	7th
Score	87.44
Price	$15.10/lb
Auction value	$6,991.30

Confirmed against the Alliance for Coffee Excellence’s published Honduras 2025 results.⁴

Read it carefully in both directions. It is a real result: 87.44 points clears the Cup of Excellence threshold, under blind judging, in a category alongside Typica and Pacas lots. A variety the catalogue rates at the floor of the quality scale placed in a national competition. And it is a modest one: seventh in its category, at the joint-lowest price paid in it, in a year when the Exotic category was won by Geisha and Pacamara lots at multiples of that price.

What it demonstrates is the thing the catalogue rating cannot: that a quality potential score is a statement about a ceiling under ordinary conditions, not a prohibition. Given a good farm, a careful harvest and clean processing, even the family’s worst-rated line can reach a competition table. Its far more widely planted sibling Lempira still has not.⁴

Why it matters

IHCAFE 90 is the Catimor bargain in its most extreme form. Take a productive dwarf, bolt on borrowed Robusta resistance, aim the result at the warmest and lowest ground in the country, and accept whatever happens to the cup. Honduras got a tree that fruits in year two and yields heavily on land that would otherwise grow no Arabica at all — and, as the C-market page records, a national crop that trades at par with the New York price, no origin differential, which is the bulk market’s flat verdict on coffee grown from varieties like this one.

Then the rust resistance failed, which removed the only reason the trade made sense.

IHCAFE’s answer, thirty years later, was Parainema — a Sarchimor rather than a Catimor, rated highly resistant to rust and Good in the cup, with a Cup of Excellence category of its own. That is the same institute solving the same problem without paying the same price. IHCAFE 90 is the version that came first, and the clearest evidence of why the second one had to exist.

Related

• Catimor — the family it belongs to, and the full comparison of every named selection
• Lempira — the sibling IHCAFE bred from the same material, more widely planted and rated one step higher
• T5175 — the unreleased Costa Rican line both Honduran varieties were selected from
• Caturra · Timor Hybrid — the two parents: the productive dwarf, and the borrowed resistance
• Robusta — the second species behind that resistance
• IHCAFE — the institute that bred it, and the three varieties that carry its name
• Parainema · Sarchimor — Honduras’s better answer to the same problem
• Honduras — the origin it was built for, its six regions and its auction record
• Coffee leaf rust — the disease it was bred against and lost to
• Cup of Excellence · Alliance for Coffee Excellence — the competition whose 2025 Honduran results it appears in
• World Coffee Research — keeper of the catalogue every rating on this page comes from
• ICAFE · CATIE — the Costa Rican institutions behind T5175
• Typica · Pacas · Geisha · Pacamara — what it was judged alongside in 2025
• Cupping · Coffee scoring — how the quality claims here would have to be settled
• C-market · Premiumisation — why a country planted with varieties like this trades at par

Official links

• Official site — World Coffee Research variety catalogue: IHCAFE 90
• Official site — World Coffee Research
• Official site — IHCAFE (Instituto Hondureño del Café) — unconfirmed: the site returned HTTP 403 to automated checks elsewhere in this wiki, so nothing here rests on IHCAFE’s own pages

Footnotes

1. World Coffee Research variety catalogue — IHCAFE 90 — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹

2. World Coffee Research variety catalogue — T5175 — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

3. Honduran Coffee: Exploring Common Varieties — Perfect Daily Grind — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Cup of Excellence Honduras 2025 results and auction — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩²