Lempira

Lempira is a coffee variety bred in Honduras by the national coffee institute IHCAFE. It is a Catimor — the family made by crossing the compact, productive Caturra with the Timor Hybrid, a natural Arabica–Robusta cross that carries resistance to Coffee leaf rust.¹ Its specific parentage in the World Coffee Research catalogue is Timor Hybrid 832/1 × Caturra, the same cross behind half a dozen other Catimor lines.¹

For years it was the most widely planted variety in Honduras, and it is the single clearest example of the bargain the whole rust-resistant hybrid project made: a tree that kept farms alive, produced heavily, cupped poorly, and then lost its resistance anyway.

A note on the name. “Lempira” in Honduras means three other things before it means a coffee plant. Lempira was a Lenca leader who fought the Spanish conquest and died in 1537; the lempira is the national currency; and Lempira is one of the country’s departments, in the western highlands.² All four uses turn up in coffee writing, and they are easy to confuse — the Cup of Excellence Honduras results, for instance, list Lempira as a growing region next to farms planted with entirely different varieties.³

What the catalogue says

Every row below is from the World Coffee Research variety catalogue entry for Lempira, 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	Bronze
Bean size	Average
Yield potential	High
Quality potential at high altitude	Low
Coffee leaf rust	Intermediate — but confirmed susceptible in Honduras by scientific evaluation
Nematodes	Susceptible
Coffee berry disease	Susceptible
Ojo de gallo	Susceptible
Nutrition requirement	High
Planting density	5,000–6,000 plants/ha, single-stem pruning
Optimal altitude	1,000–1,600 m near the equator; 700–1,300 m at 5–15° latitude; 400–1,000 m above 15°

The catalogue adds two things worth carrying around. Lempira is “highly similar to Costa Rica 95” — a different institute’s version of the same cross, which the same catalogue also records as having been confirmed susceptible to rust in its own country. And Lempira is recommended for the warmest zones and for acidic, aluminium-rich soils:¹ ground where an heirloom Arabica struggles. This was never a variety bred for the trophy block.

To verify — bean size

A Honduran project document describes Lempira’s beans as large (screen 17), elongated and wide, similar to Typica.⁴ The World Coffee Research catalogue rates bean size “average.”¹ These directly conflict, and the catalogue is the better-provenanced of the two. Do not repeat “screen 17” as a specification.

Who made it, and when

IHCAFE developed Lempira through pedigree selection — repeatedly choosing and re-sowing the best offspring across generations until the line breeds true.¹ The institute’s own account describes it as the variety that carried Honduran production for a generation.⁵

The release date is the messiest fact on this page.

To verify — the release year

The World Coffee Research catalogue gives no year for Lempira at all,¹ and the sources that do give one disagree:

• 1996 — a coffee-knowledge site lists it as both identified and released that year.⁶
• 1997 — a video featuring IHCAFE agronomists says liberado en 1997, with mass adoption following.⁵
• “Late 1990s” — a roaster explainer summarising third-party data.⁷
• “The 1960s” — a roaster guide’s claim.⁸ This conflicts with everything else and with the Catimor family’s own timeline; if it refers to anything real it is early Catimor material, not the named Lempira line. Do not use it.

The defensible statement is that IHCAFE released Lempira in the mid-to-late 1990s. Anything more precise needs an IHCAFE or PROMECAFE release document, and none was read here.

To verify — the pedigree base

The catalogue records the cross plainly as Timor Hybrid 832/1 × Caturra.¹ A Honduran project document instead states Lempira “proviene del Catimor T8667, seleccionada por el IHCAFE” — that it was selected out of the T8667 line.⁴ These are not necessarily contradictory, since T8667 is itself Timor Hybrid 832/1 × Caturra, so the pedigree would come out the same either way. But whether IHCAFE selected from T8667 specifically, or made its own cross, is unconfirmed by any source read here — and the catalogue names a third possibility. Its entry for T5175, the Costa Rican Catimor ICAFE never released, states that “in Honduras, additional selection of T5175 led to the creation of IHCAFE 90 and Lempira.”⁹ That is the best-provenanced of the three accounts, and it does not change the written pedigree, since T5175 is itself Timor Hybrid 832/1 × Caturra. The IHCAFE page also records that Lempira was developed with PROMECAFE, the regional Central American coffee programme; the catalogue entry read here does not mention a co-breeder.

What the plant is like to farm

Lempira behaves like its Caturra parent, which is the point of the cross. It is short, so pickers can reach the cherries and farmers can pack 5,000–6,000 trees into a hectare instead of the two or three thousand a tall heirloom needs. New leaves come in bronze-tipped rather than green — the usual visual tell for a Catimor.¹¹⁰ It yields high.

The cost is appetite. Lempira’s nutrition requirement is rated high: dense planting plus heavy cropping means heavy fertilising, and a farm that cannot afford inputs will not get the yields the variety promises.¹ A Honduran agronomic report puts it bluntly, calling Lempira “muy precoz, productiva y exigente en el manejo agronómico, especialmente en la nutrición” — very early-bearing, productive, and demanding in management, especially nutrition.⁴

And the disease column is a wall of red. Beyond rust, the catalogue rates Lempira susceptible to nematodes (root-attacking microscopic worms), susceptible to coffee berry disease, and susceptible to ojo de gallo — “rooster’s eye,” the fungal leaf-and-berry disease that plagues wet, heavily shaded farms.¹ A grower’s own report and Perfect Daily Grind’s survey of Honduran varieties both say the same about rust and ojo de gallo in the field today.⁴¹⁰

The rust story, which is the whole story

Lempira exists because of Hemileia vastatrix. Rust strips the leaves off a coffee tree, the tree stops photosynthesising, and the farm stops earning. Arabica has almost no defence; the Timor Hybrid’s Robusta half does. Every Catimor, Lempira included, is an attempt to bolt that defence onto a productive Arabica frame.

It worked, for a while, at enormous scale. Lempira became the most planted variety in Honduras on the strength of exactly three things: it was short, it produced heavily, and it did not get rust.⁵⁶

Then it did. The World Coffee Research catalogue rates Lempira’s rust resistance “intermediate” and immediately qualifies it: susceptibility has been confirmed in Honduras through scientific evaluation.¹ That is the catalogue saying, in its own careful register, that the variety no longer does the job it was built for.

To verify — when the resistance broke

Two sources date the breakdown to around 2017: a coffee-knowledge site, and a video featuring IHCAFE agronomists that says resistance stopped holding “a partir del año 2017,” prompting Honduras to diversify into other varieties.⁶⁵ The catalogue confirms the susceptibility but attaches no date to it,¹ and no published rust-race survey was read here. Treat 2017 as the reported year, not an established one.

This is not a Lempira-specific failure. Rust is a living organism under selection pressure, and it adapts to whatever is planted against it. The Catimor page documents the same ending for Costa Rica 95 and for Lempira’s Honduran sibling IHCAFE 90. Resistance bred in the 1970s and 1990s is not resistance forever.

What it tastes like

The catalogue’s rating is Low quality potential at high altitude — the second-lowest step on a four-step scale, the same rating given to T8667 and Costa Rica 95, and one step above the “Very low” given to IHCAFE 90.¹ For comparison, Caturra itself rates “Good.”

To verify — the flavour descriptions

Roaster- and retail-facing sources describe Lempira in warm terms that sit awkwardly against that rating, and they do not agree with each other:

• “Smooth, mellow, caramel and chocolate,” used as a blend base for balance — a roaster’s product copy.⁸
• “Bright acidity, full body, fruity notes” — a retail explainer.⁷
• “Sabor agradable a frutos secos, acidez viva, efervescente como tamarindo” — pleasant nutty flavour, lively acidity, effervescent like tamarind — from a Honduran project document.⁴
• “Sweet and balanced,” mild sweet aroma, “good cup potential” — a coffee-knowledge site.⁶

None of these is a cupping result. No SCA cupping score, competition placement, auction price or named buyer for a Lempira lot was found or verified here. If you need a number, the catalogue’s “Low” is the only defensible one.

The competition record: an absence

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. That makes it possible to check what a variety actually does under blind judging.

Lempira does not appear. The 2025 Honduran competition judged 28 placing lots across three categories — Exotic, Traditional, and a category reserved for Parainema. Not one lot was a Lempira.³ The Catimor and Sarchimor pages of this wiki record the same negative result for the 2023 and 2024 editions.

Two details from 2025 sharpen it. First, IHCAFE 90 did place — Los Cipreses, seventh in the Traditional category, 87.44 points at $15.10/lb — so a low-rated Honduran Catimor can reach that table.³ Lempira, far more widely planted, still did not. Second, three of the placing Traditional lots came from the Lempira region, planted to Typica and Pacas.³ Even on its own ground, the variety that shares the name is not what gets entered.

An absence is not proof that Lempira cannot cup. Farmers enter their best micro-lot, and nobody picks their commodity block for a national competition. But across three consecutive years of published results in the country where the variety is planted most heavily, it is the closest thing to evidence that exists, and it points one way.

How much of Honduras is Lempira

This is the number everyone wants and nobody has cleanly. Lempira is consistently named among the primary varieties of Honduran production by green importers and origin profiles,¹¹¹² and it is widely grown in the high-altitude departments — Copán, Lempira, Ocotepeque.⁷ What it was, above all, is the variety that let a smallholder sector of roughly 120,000 farms keep producing through the rust years while Honduras grew into Central America’s largest producer.

To verify — the scale figures

A Honduran project document reports: 220,000 hectares planted to Lempira, averaging 28 quintales per hectare (a quintal being roughly 100 lb of parchment coffee); 29% of national coffee production; a 6.5% contribution to national GDP; and production rising from 848,300 forty-six-kilo bags in 2018/19 to 3,225,184 in 2019/20.⁴

None of this is verified, and some of it does not survive arithmetic. The document is a project write-up hosted on a document-sharing site, not an IHCAFE, USDA or ICO statistical release, and nothing was cross-checked against those. The production figures imply a near-fourfold jump in a single season, which no national harvest does. And 3.2 million 46 kg bags is about 2.5 million 60 kg bags — roughly 38% of the ~6.4 million-bag national crop recorded on the Honduras page, not the 29% claimed in the same document. Treat every figure in this callout as an unverified project-level estimate. If you need Lempira’s true share of Honduran production, it has not been established here.

Why it matters

Lempira is what the rust-resistance bargain looks like when a whole country takes it. IHCAFE bred a tree that was short, hungry, prolific and immune, handed it to a smallholder sector that badly needed all four, and the sector planted it. Honduras stayed in business. The C-market page records the result at the other end: Honduran coffee trades at par with the New York price, no origin differential at all — the bulk market’s flat verdict on a crop grown largely from varieties like this one.

Then the immunity failed, and what was left was a high-yielding tree rated Low in the cup that still gets rust.

Honduras’s answer was Parainema — a Sarchimor, not a Catimor, rated highly resistant and Good in the cup, with its own Cup of Excellence category and a real record of placing lots at 87–90 points.³ That is the same institute solving the same problem thirty years later without giving away the flavour. Lempira is the version that came first, and the reason the second one had to exist.

Related

• Catimor — the family Lempira belongs to, and the full comparison of its named selections
• Caturra · Timor Hybrid — the two parents: the productive dwarf, and the rust resistance
• Robusta — the second species behind that resistance
• IHCAFE — the institute that bred it, and the two other varieties it made
• IHCAFE 90 — the sibling Catimor, rated lower still, that nonetheless placed at Cup of Excellence in 2025
• Parainema · Sarchimor — Honduras’s better answer to the same problem
• Honduras — the origin Lempira was built for, and its production and auction record
• Coffee leaf rust — the disease it was bred against and eventually lost to
• Cup of Excellence · Alliance for Coffee Excellence — the competition whose published results Lempira is absent from
• World Coffee Research — keeper of the catalogue every rating on this page comes from
• Typica · Pacas · Geisha · Pacamara — what actually gets entered from Honduran farms
• C-market · Premiumisation — why a country planted with varieties like this trades at par
• Cupping — how the quality claims above would have to be settled

Official links

• Official site — World Coffee Research variety catalogue: Lempira
• 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 — Lempira — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴

2. Lempira — Wikipedia — confirmed via WebFetch ↩

3. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Cup of Excellence Honduras 2025 results and auction — confirmed via WebFetch ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

4. Proyecto de Café Lempira — Honduran project document (Scribd) ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

5. ¿Por qué el Lempira marcó la caficultura de Honduras? — video featuring IHCAFE agronomists ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

6. Lempira — Coffeester ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

7. Honduras Coffee Beans: Types, Regions, Taste and Best Brands — Colipse Coffee ↩ ↩² ↩³

8. Honduran Coffee: The Complete Guide — Spirit Origin ↩ ↩²

9. World Coffee Research variety catalogue — T5175 — confirmed via WebFetch ↩

10. Honduran Coffee: Exploring Common Varieties — Perfect Daily Grind ↩ ↩²

11. Honduras Coffee: A Deep Dive into History, Cultivation and Flavor — Genuine Origin ↩

12. Origin Profile: Honduras Coffee — Royal New York ↩