Specialty Coffee Wiki

JARC 74165

Properties3
descriptionThe numbered Ethiopian cultivar from the Jimma Agricultural Research Center that won Ethiopia's 2021 Cup of Excellence outright — the only anaerobic coffee ever to top the country's national table.
tagsvariety, ethiopia, sidama, bensa, guji, jarc, africa
aliases74165, Ethiopian 74165, Ethiopia local variety 74165

11 min read

JARC 74165

JARC 74165 is another of Ethiopia’s coffee plants with a catalogue number instead of a name, selected by the government’s Jimma Agricultural Research Center — JARC. It is the less famous sibling of 74158, and it has one thing 74158 does not: it won Ethiopia’s Cup of Excellence in 2021, and it won as an anaerobic coffee.12

If you have bought an Ethiopian bag labelled plainly “74165”, this is the plant. Everything on JARC 74158 about why a number beats the word heirloom applies here too: “heirloom” is trade shorthand for a mixture of local types nobody identified, while a number means one known plant that somebody kept separate from tree to sack.

What it actually won

This is the part that does not depend on roaster copy. Ethiopia’s national competition results are published by the Alliance for Coffee Excellence, and 74165 sits at the very top of one of them.

YearRankProducerRegionScoreProcessPrice
120211aTamiru Tadesse Tesema (Alo Coffee)Sidama, Bensa woreda90.60Anaerobic$150.00/lb
220211bTamiru Tadesse Tesema (Alo Coffee)Sidama, Bensa woreda90.60Anaerobic$140.20/lb
320226Tilahune Horsa Fata—89.92Natural$30.70/lb

The 2021 rows were read directly from the official Cup of Excellence results page, which lists the variety and process for each lot; the prices come from the Alliance for Coffee Excellence auction table for the same competition.12 The 2022 row was read directly from the official ACE results table.3 150.00/lb works out to about **331 a kilo**.

Three things follow from that table.

A single split harvest holds the title. Ranks 1a and 1b are the same coffee from the same farmer, divided into two auction lots — the standard Cup of Excellence practice when a winning lot is big enough to sell twice. So Ethiopia’s 2021 national champion coffee was 74165, once, not twice.1

It beat its own siblings. Second place in 2021 (ranks 2a and 2b, 90.50) was 74110; third was Typica.1 The following year 74165 was pushed down to sixth by three other numbered JARC lines.3 The entire top of Ethiopia’s competition circuit is a family argument between 1970s research-station selections.

Its win was anaerobic, and that is unusual. JARC 74158’s whole record run — 2022, 2024, the highest Cup of Excellence price ever paid anywhere — is fruit-dried natural. 74165’s championship lot was anaerobic: cherry fermented in a sealed, low-oxygen environment before drying. On the published record, 74165 is the only variety to have taken Ethiopia’s national title with that process.

It also has a clear absence. 74165 does not appear anywhere in Ethiopia’s 2024 results — the year its sibling 74158 set the all-time auction record — neither in the auction table nor among the National Winners.4 Two placements in four years is a real record, not a habit.

Where it came from

Here the ground gets much softer, and the honest answer is that nobody consulted for this note has read a JARC document about this plant.

What is solid is the programme it came out of, which is documented on Jimma Agricultural Research Center: from around 1970 JARC sent teams into Ethiopia’s coffee forests, catalogued what they collected in field gene banks, and propagated the plants that combined yield with resistance to Coffee berry disease — a fungus that blackens the fruit on the branch while it is still growing, and the single biggest threat to an Ethiopian crop. Yield and disease came first in the founding brief; flavour was not in it.

To verify

The 1974 Metu Bishari story. The research behind this note reports that 74165 came from the Metu Bishari selections, taken from forest coffee in the Illubabor zone of western Ethiopia in 1974, and that the “74” prefix marks the year the seed was collected and catalogued. The load-bearing source is a single Australian roaster’s varietal glossary, cited twice under two URLs — one source, not two — and it returned HTTP 403 to every attempt to read it here.56 The account is not implausible: this wiki’s JARC 74158 note carries the identical Metu Bishari / Illuababora / coffee-berry-disease story for the neighbouring number, from a roaster page that was read at source. But “the sibling’s paperwork says this” is not evidence about 74165, and the 74-means-1974 decoding is folk knowledge repeated across the trade rather than anything published by JARC or EIAR.

To verify

There is no release year. Unlike 74158 — for which a roaster gives a specific 1979 release approval, itself contested on that page — no source consulted names a release date for 74165 at all. The research report’s opening line calls it a “mid-1970s release,” but nothing in its own body supports a release year, only a selection year. Treat 74165 as selected in the 1970s cohort, release date unknown.

To verify

What it was selected for. Several commercial and aggregator pages state that 74165 specifically was selected for coffee berry disease resistance, and one roaster adds that it was bred for high elevations and slow, even maturation.789 The CBD claim fits JARC’s documented brief exactly and is contradicted nowhere. But every page saying it is a consumer-facing or SEO source with no institutional document behind it, the roaster page carrying the high-elevation claim returned HTTP 404 here,10 and no quantitative agronomic data for 74165 — recommended altitude band, yield figures, disease scores — was found anywhere. Do not quote an altitude recommendation for this variety as if JARC published one.

To verify

No entry in the industry variety catalogue. World Coffee Research’s variety database, the reference this wiki uses for SL28, Bourbon and Timor Hybrid, returned HTTP 404 for a 74165 record — the same result recorded on JARC 74158. Nothing on this page comes from WCR.

Where it is grown

Two documented plantings, both unconfirmed at source, and both far from the Illubabor forests the plant is said to have been collected in.

To verify

Buku Able, Hambella, Guji. A US roaster sells an anaerobic lot from Buku Able in Hambella, Guji, listed as 100% variety 74165 grown at 2,350 m. The product page returned HTTP 404 when checked here, so nothing on it — variety, altitude or process — could be confirmed, and no score or price is reported.10

To verify

Kedamesa, Limu. A UK roaster sells a washed lot from Negash Abarago, a second-generation farmer in Kedamesa village, Limu, processed at the local Kedamesa drying station at 2,050 m, harvested October–December 2023, with the variety given as a mix of “Jarc 74110/74165” and a reported SCA cup score of 88. The page returned HTTP 429 here and could not be read.11 Two cautions even if it is accurate: an 88 on a seller’s own page is an in-house cupping, not a published competition score — see Coffee scoring — and a 74110/74165 blend tells you nothing about either plant on its own.

Set against the confirmed competition record, the pattern is the familiar Ethiopian one: a plant selected in the wet southwest, now earning its money in the high southern and southeastern highlands — Bensa in Sidama for the championship lot, reportedly Guji and Limu in the retail trade, everywhere above roughly 2,000 metres.

The claim this note exists to correct

To verify

The research pass behind this note concluded 74165 has no competition record. The automated report states that “no primary competition records (Best of Panama, Cup of Excellence, ACE auctions) list a coffee specifically identified as JARC 74165,” and that the only cupping score it could find for the variety was a roaster’s own 88 points. That is wrong, and it is wrong about the most important fact on this page: 74165 won Ethiopia’s 2021 Cup of Excellence outright at 90.60 points and $150.00 a pound, and placed sixth in 2022 at 89.92. Both results were read directly from the official Cup of Excellence and Alliance for Coffee Excellence pages for this note,123 and the 2021 result was already recorded on Alo Coffee and Bensa before it. The negative finding is preserved here only so that nobody re-derives it and “corrects” the table above. The identical failure is logged on JARC 74158.

There is a reason this keeps happening. Competition tables print the bare number — 74165 — never “JARC 74165,” so a search for the branded form finds roaster copy and misses the primary record entirely.

Why it matters

74165 is the second data point in a pattern that JARC 74158 establishes and this note confirms: Ethiopia wins its own national competition with utility plants. These were government selections bred to survive a fungus and produce a crop on a two-hectare smallholding. Four decades later they hold the country’s championship years in a row, and the variety that dominates the top of the auction market everywhere else — Geisha — does not appear at all.

Its specific contribution is the processing half of the story. 74158’s fame is tied to long, slow natural drying. 74165’s one championship came out of a sealed tank in Bensa. Same breeding cohort, same district, opposite post-harvest route, both above 90 points — which is a useful argument against reading any Ethiopian number as a fixed flavour promise. See Anaerobic fermentation and Cupping.

Footnotes

  1. Cup of Excellence — Ethiopia 2021 official results — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the 74165 identification, the 90.60 score, the anaerobic process, the Sidama/Bensa location and the 74110 second place ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  2. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Ethiopia 2021 results and auction — source of the 150.00/lb and 140.20/lb auction prices for lots 1a and 1b ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Ethiopia 2022 results and auction — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the rank-6 lot, Tilahune Horsa Fata, 89.92, natural, $30.70/lb ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Ethiopia 2024 results and auction — confirmed via WebFetch; checked for 74165 and returned none ↩

  5. Sample Coffee — 74165 varietal — the source of the Metu Bishari, Illubabor and 1974 claims; returned HTTP 403 here ↩

  6. Sample Coffee — all varietals index — the same site’s index page, cited separately in the research report but not an independent source ↩

  7. EthioCoffee — Ethiopian heirloom coffee varieties and landraces ↩

  8. Green Coffee Collective — JARC coffee varieties glossary ↩

  9. Green Plantation — Ethiopian coffee tree varieties: JARC vs heirloom ↩

  10. Big Shoulders Coffee — Buku Able Anaerobic, Guji, Ethiopia — source of the 100% 74165, 2,350 m and high-elevation claims; returned HTTP 404 here ↩ ↩2

  11. La Peche Coffee — Ethiopia, Negash Abarago, washed, JARC 74110/74165 — source of the Kedamesa/Limu planting, 2,050 m, harvest window and 88-point score; returned HTTP 429 here ↩

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