JARC 74110

JARC 74110 is another Ethiopian coffee plant that carries a filing number instead of a name. It was collected from wild forest trees, catalogued, propagated and released by Ethiopia’s Jimma Agricultural Research Center — JARC — and it is the quieter sibling of JARC 74158, the selection that holds the all-time Cup of Excellence auction record.

Quieter, not absent. In Ethiopia’s 2022 national competition, 74110 took third place and seventh place, and its third-place lot sold at auction for $55.60 a pound.¹

If you have bought an Ethiopian bag labelled simply “74110”, this is it. The number is a catalogue entry, not a brand: 74 is the year the mother trees were collected, 110 is the plant’s number in the register.²

Where it came from

Two independent sources agree on the outline, and they agree with the account this wiki already records for its sibling on JARC 74158.

• The plant was selected from wild forest coffee by JARC, “for its combination of Coffee Berry Disease (CBD) resistance and good cup quality”.³
• The mother trees were “chosen from wild material in the Metu-Bishari forest area of Illubabor, in south-western Ethiopia”, during “a national programme to find trees resistant to coffee berry disease” after the outbreaks that hit Ethiopian production in the early 1970s.²
• 74110 and 74112 were released by JARC in 1979 and “distributed to smallholders across the southern growing regions”.²

So the brief was survival, not flavour. Coffee berry disease is a fungus that blackens the fruit on the branch while it is still growing and is the single biggest threat to an Ethiopian crop; 74110 exists because a government research station went looking for trees that shrugged it off. Everything it has since done on a cupping table arrived four decades later as a side effect.

It is also not a hybrid. Sweet Maria’s glossary lists the JARC numbers as selections out of local Ethiopian landraces rather than crosses with Robusta or Timor Hybrid material — the route most disease-resistant varieties elsewhere took.⁴ That distinction matters: 74110 is native arabica diversity filtered, not diluted.

To verify

The 1979 date is better supported for 74110 than for its famous sibling. This wiki’s JARC 74158 note records a live disagreement about whether 74158 was released in 1979 or in a later 1980s–90s wave. The source behind that doubt puts 74110 and 74112 in the earlier wave, which lines up with the 1979 release recorded here.⁵ That is corroboration by a second route, not proof — no JARC or EIAR bulletin was located for this note either, and Ethiopia’s national research body EIAR keeps refusing connections at eiar.gov.et. Treat 1979 as well-attested trade knowledge rather than a documented release record.

To verify

Rust resistance. One commercial site describes 74110 as rust-resistant as well as berry-disease-resistant.⁶ No JARC paper, EIAR document or second independent source confirms it, and every institutional description of the selection programme frames it around Coffee berry disease specifically. The same claim is already flagged on JARC 74158. Do not state 74110 as resistant to Coffee leaf rust.

The competition record

This is the part that does not rest on roaster copy. Ethiopia’s Cup of Excellence results are published by the Alliance for Coffee Excellence, and 74110 is throughout them. Every row below was read directly from an official results page.

	Year	Rank	Producer	Region	Score	Process	Auction price
1	2022	3a	A/Tamam A/Oli A/Gojam	Oromia	90.19	Washed	$53.11/lb
2	2022	3b	A/Tamam A/Oli A/Gojam	Oromia	90.19	Washed	$55.60/lb
3	2022	7	Wolde Faye Koricha	Oromia	89.78	Natural	$51.99/lb
4	2022	9	Abebe Hewiso Wicho	Sidama	89.36	Natural	$50.50/lb
5	2022	17	Yohannis Tadesse Taayee	Oromia	88.17	Natural	$20.10/lb
6	2022	18	Alemayehu Gosaye Gobena	SNNPR	88.17	Natural	$13.10/lb
7	2022	22	Kebede Genalle Arrare	Oromia	88.03	Natural	$11.00/lb
8	2022	23	Awol Siraj Abdella	Oromia	87.92	Natural	$18.10/lb
9	2022	27	Gemeda Kumi Qannoo	Oromia	87.75	Natural	$16.60/lb
10	2022	30	Geno Adula Sutiya	Oromia	87.17	Natural	$8.60/lb
11	2021	11	Robe Iticha Gurumu	Oromia, East Welega, Limmu	88.40	Natural	—
12	2021	14	AASH Coffee Pulping PLC	Oromia, West Arsi, Nensebo	88.32	Natural	—
13	2021	18	Tracon Trading PLC	Oromia, Jimma, Gera	88.06	Natural	—
14	2021	26	Robi Wet Coffee Processing PLC	Oromia, West Arsi, Nensebo	87.53	Natural	—
15	2021	28	AASH Coffee Pulping PLC	Oromia, West Arsi, Nensebo	87.47	Natural	—
16	2024	8	Samuel	Sidama	89.00	Natural	$24.60/lb
17	2024	11	Sebeto	Sidama	87.67	Natural	$11.70/lb
18	2024	12	Tesfaye	Sidama	87.65	Natural	$22.20/lb
19	2024	National Winner	Niguse	South Ethiopia	86.41	Natural	$7.40/lb
20	2024	National Winner	Esyas	Oromiya	86.04	Natural	$5.10/lb

Sources: ACE — Ethiopia 2022, Cup of Excellence — Ethiopia 2021 and ACE — Ethiopia 2024, all fetched and read for this note.¹⁷⁸ The 2021 page publishes scores but no auction prices.

Four things worth holding onto:

It is a genuine podium plant. 90.19 points and $55.60/lb is not a supporting-cast result. Only two selections finished above it in 2022 — JARC 74158 at first and 74112 at second — and the entire published top eight that year was numbered JARC material.¹ Ethiopia, the country with the deepest coffee gene pool on earth, wins its own competition with 1970s government selections.

It is not the record holder, and the gap is enormous. 74158’s winning lot the same year took 400.50/lb**; 74110's best took **55.60/lb for a coffee scoring only half a point lower.¹ Roughly the same cup, roughly one-seventh the price. What separates them is which number buyers had already decided to chase — see Premiumisation.

It wins mostly as a natural, but its best result was washed. Seventeen of the twenty rows above were dried whole in the cherry. The two highest-priced lots were not: A/Tamam’s third-place coffee is washed.¹ That cuts against the assumption that Ethiopia’s competition run is a natural-process story throughout.

It is an Oromia plant more than a Sidama one. Where 74158’s record lots cluster in Bensa woreda in Sidama, 74110’s 2021 and 2022 placings come overwhelmingly from Oromia — Welega, West Arsi, Jimma, Gera.¹⁷ By 2024 the pattern had flipped and its three ranked lots were all Sidama.⁸ The plant travelled.

To verify

The research pass behind this note concluded 74110 has no competition record at all. The automated report used to build this page states that it found no Cup of Excellence, ACE or auction result naming 74110, and that its fame is “mostly among Ethiopian specialty buyers rather than as an auction-branded variety.” That is flatly wrong, and the table above is why: every row comes from an official ACE or Cup of Excellence results page fetched directly. The same false negative was recorded and corrected on JARC 74158. Noted here so nobody re-derives it and “fixes” this page.

To verify

How the 2022 third-place producer’s name should be written. ACE’s table gives “A/Tamam A/Oli A/Gojam” in the lot list and “A/Temam” in the summary. Abbreviated Ethiopian given names beginning A/ are conventional in these records, but which full form is meant is not stated anywhere on the page, and the two spellings are not reconciled. Written here exactly as the official lot table has it.

Where it is grown

74110 started in the far southwest — Illubabor, near the Jimma country where the research station sits — and spread east and south across the smallholder regions.

An Ethiopian coffee-trade source states that decades after release, 74110 and 74112 are among “the most widely planted named varietals in Yirgacheffe, Gedeb, Guji, and Sidama”.² The competition record above independently supports the same picture and widens it: ranked 74110 lots come from Sidama, Guji, Limu/Welega, West Arsi and Jimma/Gera.¹⁷⁸

That is a much broader footprint than a boutique variety has. 74110 is a working plant on ordinary smallholdings, most of which will never enter a competition and whose coffee is sold as undifferentiated “heirloom” anyway — see Ethiopia for why that word covers most of the country’s crop.

To verify

The stated altitude range, and the Kenissa cooperative lot. A roaster journal is the only source for a general growing band of 1,000–2,200 m for 74110 regions, and for a specific lot from the Kenissa Cooperative in Agaro, Gera Woreda, Jimma, Oromia at 2,100 m, wet-processed.⁹ The page returned HTTP 403 to every attempt made here, so none of it could be read at source, and the wide altitude band conflicts with the high-altitude picture the competition lots suggest. Not stated as fact.

To verify

The Suke Drying Station lot. A social-media post and a bean-database entry describe a mixed 74158 / 74110 / 74112 lot from around 23 farmers in the village of Uddo Hadammaa, Shakiso, Guji, Oromia, at an average 2,100 m, processed at the Suke Drying Station run by Sookoo Coffee.¹⁰¹¹ Neither page was fetched for this note, the two are the same claim in two places rather than two witnesses, and the processing method is not stated — washed or natural is unknown. The same lot is already recorded, with the same caveats, on JARC 74158.

To verify

The Negash Abarago lot in Limu. A UK roaster’s product page describes a mixed JARC 74110/74112 coffee from second-generation farmer Negash Abarago, on a family farm in Kedamesa village, Limu, Oromia — harvested October to December 2023, processed at the Kedamesa village drying station, grown at 2,050 m, scored 88, tasting of “silky stone fruit complexity,” “fresh and vibrant acidity” and “a touch of bergamot on the finish.”¹² Single commercial source, not fetched here, and the 88 is a roaster-reported number with no cupper, Q Grader or organisation named — not a verifiable CQI record. The page’s own URL slug belongs to a different coffee entirely (a Colombian Caturra), which is the signature of a duplicated product listing and a reason for extra caution about every figure on it.

What it tastes like

The strongest sensory evidence is the competition record, not a variety profile: ten lots between 87.17 and 90.19 points in a single blind-judged national field, and five more between 87.47 and 88.40 the year before.¹⁷ Those numbers were produced by juries cupping to protocol — see Cupping and Coffee scoring — which is a different quality of evidence from a seller’s tasting note.

At variety level, the descriptors that recur are floral, citrus and complex; one glossary adds that “74110 maintains the complex, floral character Ethiopian coffees are known for.”³ A trade source describes specialty 74110 lots out of Yirgacheffe, Gedeb, Guji and Sidama as generally floral and fruity.²

Read that as a family resemblance, not a signature. Ethiopian cups move at least as much with processing, altitude and drying discipline as with the plant — which is exactly why the same variety turns up washed and third in the country one year and natural and eighth two years later.

To verify

The published cupping scores that are not competition results. One commercial page reports a 74110 lot at 2,100 m cupping 86.5 points under SCAA protocol (2023), with “clean acidity of green apple and lemon zest, silky body, raw almond and dried apricot”.⁶ No cupper, competition or form is named, and the same page’s companion figure for 74158 is already flagged on that note. It reads as an internal or educational cupping, not a public record. A second unverified score — the roaster-reported 88 for the Limu lot — is flagged above.¹² Neither is quotable, and note that both sit below the ten official Cup of Excellence scores in the table.

To verify

Other descriptors, from an unreadable page. Raspberry, red grape and orange are attributed to 74110 by the same roaster journal that returned HTTP 403 here.⁹ Recorded, not confirmed.

Prices and buyers

The only prices for 74110 that can be checked are auction prices, and they are all in the table above: a 2022 high of 55.60/lb**, a 2024 high of **24.60/lb, and a 2022 tail running down to $8.60/lb.¹⁸ That spread — nearly seven-fold within one competition — is the useful number, because it shows how quickly bidding falls away once a lot is not on the podium.

No farm-gate, FOB or export price for 74110 was found in any source. A UK roaster lists a Limu 74110/74112 at “£20kg,” but the pack size on the page is unclear and the listing has the duplicated-URL problem described above, so what that figure actually prices is unresolved.¹² Competition prices are one determined bidder and one small bag; they say nothing about what an ordinary sack of 74110 is worth. See Premiumisation and Green coffee auctions.

The Panama footnote

74110 has one odd appearance far outside Ethiopia. Finca Sophia in Panama says its exclusive variety Guayabita is “genetically similar to the Ethiopian cultivar 74110” — which, if true, would make a Panamanian farm discovery an escapee from this lineage.

That claim comes from the farm that sells the coffee, with no laboratory, method or date named, and this wiki does not treat it as established. It is recorded here because a reader who arrives at 74110 from the Panama side deserves to find the caveat attached; details are on Guayabita.

Why it matters

74110 is the control case for JARC 74158. Same station, same forest, same year of collection, same release, same disease brief — and a cup the judges rated within half a point of the national winner. What it does not have is the name recognition, and the auction results show exactly what that is worth: about seven times the price, for the same coffee quality.

That makes it the clearest illustration in this wiki of a fact the specialty trade rarely says out loud. Score is not price. A number on a bag becomes valuable when enough buyers decide to chase it, and 74158 got chased. 74110 grew up in the same forest and mostly did not.

Related

• JARC 74158 — its famous sibling, collected in the same 1974 programme and released alongside it
• Jimma Agricultural Research Center · Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research — the station that selected it and its parent body
• Ethiopia — the forests it came from, and why most of the country’s coffee still says “heirloom”
• Sidama · Bensa · Yirgacheffe — the regions where its lots are grown and won with
• Cup of Excellence · Alliance for Coffee Excellence · Cup of Excellence records by country — where its competition record is published
• Coffee berry disease · Coffee leaf rust — the disease it was bred against, and the one it may or may not resist
• Natural process · Washed process — the two processing routes its ranked lots took
• Cupping · Coffee scoring · Q Grader — what 90.19 means and who decides it
• Guayabita — the Panamanian variety claimed to be genetically close to it
• SL28 — the other African numbered research-station selection
• Geisha — the variety Ethiopia’s competition record conspicuously does not involve
• Premiumisation · Green coffee auctions — why a 90.19 sold for a seventh of what a 90.69 did
• World Coffee Research — the industry variety catalogue, which has no entry for it
• Robusta · Timor Hybrid — the disease-resistance route this variety did not take

Official links

• (no official variety page found — JARC’s parent body, the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research, publishes no reachable variety register; eiar.gov.et refused every connection made for this note and for JARC 74158 and Jimma Agricultural Research Center)
• Official results — Cup of Excellence, Ethiopia 2022 — the primary record of 74110’s third- and seventh-place lots and their auction prices
• Official results — Cup of Excellence, Ethiopia 2021 — its five ranked lots the year before
• Official results — Cup of Excellence, Ethiopia 2024 — its most recent ranked lots
• World Coffee Research — Arabica variety catalogue — the industry reference register, which carries no 74110 entry¹³

Footnotes

1. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Ethiopia 2022 results and auction — confirmed via WebFetch; source of every 2022 rank, score, process and auction price on this page ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹

2. Arabica Coffee Ethiopia — JARC 74110 & 74112 varietals guide — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the 1974 collection, Metu-Bishari forest origin, 1979 release, smallholder distribution and current planting regions ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

3. Keffa Coffee — 74110 variety glossary entry — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the wild-forest selection, CBD resistance and the floral-citrus-complex profile ↩ ↩²

4. Sweet Maria’s — Ethiopia varieties glossary — source of the JARC numbers being landrace selections rather than hybrids ↩

5. EthioCoffee — Ethiopian heirloom coffee varieties and landraces — places 74110 and 74112 in the earlier JARC wave; the same page is the source of the release-date dispute recorded on JARC 74158 ↩

6. Bean Brew Digest — Ethiopia Jimma research station varieties — sole source of the rust-resistance claim and the 86.5 cupping score; not confirmed ↩ ↩²

7. Cup of Excellence — Ethiopia 2021 official results — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the 2021 ranked lots ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

8. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Ethiopia 2024 results and auction — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the 2024 ranked and National Winner lots ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

9. Xliii Coffee — 74110 coffee variety, a promising heirloom from Ethiopia — source of the 1,000–2,200 m band, the Kenissa cooperative lot and the raspberry/red grape/orange notes; returned HTTP 403 here and could not be read ↩ ↩²

10. Sookoo Coffee / Suke Drying Station — JARC 74158, 74110 & 74112 (Instagram) — source of the Uddo Hadammaa lot; not fetched here ↩

11. RoastDB — Lucky Cat, JARC 74158 / 74110 / 74112 Ethiopian local varieties — the same Suke lot in a bean database; not fetched here ↩

12. Saint Jude Coffee — Negash Abarago, JARC 74110/74112, Ethiopia — source of the Limu lot, the roaster-reported 88 and the “£20kg” figure; note the URL slug belongs to an unrelated Colombian coffee ↩ ↩² ↩³

13. World Coffee Research — Arabica variety catalogue — checked for a 74110 record on the Guayabita note, which found none ↩