Typica Mejorada

Typica Mejorada — usually written Typica Mejorado, and sold in some auction tables as Improved Typica or National Typica — is a rare Arabica variety grown mainly in Ecuador. It won Ecuador’s 2021 Cup of Excellence outright and has been used on the World Barista Championship stage, and yet nobody has published a document saying what plant it actually is.¹²³

Start with the name, because the name is misleading. Mejorado is Spanish for improved, so the label reads as “improved Typica.” It is not Typica. Both of the sources consulted here that discuss its genetics say the variety carries no Typica lineage at all; the name describes a cup that reminded people of good Typica, not a parent.³⁴

It is the sister story to Sidra — same country, same alleged breeding station, same missing paperwork, same person credited with bringing both out. If you have read the Sidra note, you already know the shape of this one.

No variety register recognises it

The World Coffee Research Arabica variety catalogue is the closest thing the industry has to an official register of coffee varieties. It carries no entry for Typica Mejorado, Typica Mejorada, Improved Typica or Sidra. It does carry an entry for plain Typica, which is a different plant.²

That absence is not a technicality. It means there is no published description of the plant’s stature, yield, disease resistance or optimal altitude that anyone has verified — everything below comes from producers, roasters and coffee media describing what they have seen in the field.

To verify

The parentage. One account, from Qahwa World, states flatly that “Typica Mejorado contains no Typica lineage. It is a cross between Bourbon and Ethiopian landrace material.”⁴ Perfect Daily Grind tells a compatible but vaguer story — that researchers at the facility imported Ethiopian coffee seeds to develop F1 hybrids, and two standout seedlings became Sidra and Typica Mejorado.³ Neither is backed by a published genetic study, and World Coffee Research has no record of the variety to check against.² Separately, a Colombian coffee blog claims it “combines Bourbon lineage with SLN (Selección Nacional) genetics” — that appears in one SEO-oriented source with no corroboration and should not be repeated.⁵ Treat the Bourbon × Ethiopian account as the best-supported hypothesis, not a finding.

To verify

The Nestlé origin story and who spread the seed. The repeated account is that the variety came out of a Nestlé breeding station in Nanegal parish, Pichincha province, Ecuador, described as “reportedly active from the late 1990s until around 2018” and working with Ethiopian heirloom and Bourbon lines.³⁴ Don Olger Rogel, a field technician there, and his wife Magda Zabala are consistently credited with spotting the standout plants, planting them at their farm Finca Perla Negra in Nanegal, and handing seed to local farmers between 2007 and 2010.³⁴ The same article that reports all of this also says a “direct, documented connection between these varieties and any formal institutional breeding program has not been confirmed in peer-reviewed scientific literature,” and that “there is no detailed public documentation confirming the specifics of the program.”⁴ This is industry narrative built on producer testimony. The Sidra note flags the identical story for the identical reason.

The plant

What producers and coffee media report, with no register entry to check it against:³

• Tall trees with low yields — the same trade-off that pushed Typica itself off most farms.
• Plants that look very similar to Geisha, including a poor root system.
• Inconsistent bean size within a lot — some beans long and Geisha-like, others much smaller.
• Sensitive to excessive rain and sun exposure, though growers report the plants have toughened against some pests and diseases over roughly thirteen years in the ground.

Low yield is the whole commercial story. Perfect Daily Grind’s conclusion is that the variety is unlikely to reach ordinary café menus any time soon simply because there isn’t enough of it, however good it tastes.³ See Premiumisation for what happens to prices when a scarce variety acquires a competition reputation.

Where it grows

Ecuador is the main producer, concentrated in Pichincha and Loja — the two provinces that between them supplied every Typica Mejorado lot in the 2021 Cup of Excellence table.¹ It is also grown in Costa Rica and Colombia, in much smaller quantities.³ Some of the oldest plants are at Finca La Soledad in Ecuador.³

To verify

Farm-level detail outside Ecuador is thin and commercial. For Costa Rica, a roaster’s product page for the Los Angeles micro-mill (also sold as Don Cayito) in Tarrazú lists Typica Mejorada at 2,100 m, processed as a white honey — the pulper set to leave only a thin film of mucilage on the parchment, dried on patios, raised beds or mechanical driers depending on weather — with Ricardo Calderón and his family as the producers.⁶ The same page notes Calderón won the 2011 Costa Rica Cup of Excellence, but does not say the winning lot was this variety, and 2011 predates the variety’s documented spread — do not connect the two. For Colombia, a single blog gives a growing band of 1,600–2,200 m with no farm, mill or record attached.⁵

Competition record

The one part of this variety’s story that rests on primary documents is the auction table. The Alliance for Coffee Excellence publishes Ecuador’s Cup of Excellence results in full, and 2021 was a Typica Mejorado year.

	Rank	Lot	Producer	Region	Score	Price
1	1	Arashi	Abel Salinas Pacheco	Loja	90.39	$97.10/lb
2	3	Alaska Del Sur	Curt John Madison	Loja	90.07	—
3	7	Casa Rumisitana	Wilma Peñaherrera Campaña	Pichincha	89.29	—
4	10	Meridiano	Mario Jose Hervas	Pichincha	88.39	—
5	12	El Mirador	Manuel Ignacio Sandoval Ulloa	Loja	88.39	—
6	19	El Granjero	Miguel Enrique Sánchez Cevallos	Loja	87.61	—
7	22	Terrazas del Pisque	Horcaf	Pichincha	87.21	—
8	23	Maputo	Henry Arturo Gaibor Coloma	Pichincha	87.21	—

Eight of the twenty-three winning lots were Typica Mejorado, including the national champion, which sold to GK Coffee of Taiwan and partners at 97.10 a pound** — the top price of that auction.[^1] Typica Mejorado lots across the sale cleared between **16.00 and $97.10 a pound.¹ Five Sydra lots placed in the same auction, taking second, fifth and sixth — see Sidra.¹ The full Ecuadorian auction picture, including 2022 and 2023, sits on Ecuador.

The variety reappears in 2023, where ACE’s table lists Typica Mejorada, Improved Typica and National Typica as separate variety names in the same sale — see the spelling warning on Ecuador. Those are almost certainly the same plant recorded four ways.

On the barista stage, Dawn Chan of Wan Wan Coffee Roaster, representing Hong Kong, competed at the 2023 World Barista Championship in Athens with a Typica Mejorado from Finca La Soledad, scoring 450.5 in the final.³

To verify

Two placings in the secondary coverage do not match the primary records. Perfect Daily Grind’s English, Spanish and Portuguese editions all describe Dawn Chan as the fourth-place finisher at the 2023 World Barista Championship.³⁷⁸ The official final standings recorded on the World Barista Championship note put her fifth, behind Isaiah Sheese — “fourth runner-up” and “cuarta finalista” appear to have been read as fourth place. Trust the score table. Separately, the same articles say Typica Mejorado placed 1st, 3rd and 4th in the 2021 Cup of Excellence Ecuador;³⁷ the ACE results table read here confirms 1st and 3rd, but 4th is not among the Typica Mejorado lots — the next ones down are 7th, 10th and 12th.¹

What it tastes like

Perfect Daily Grind describes very clean citric and red fruit notes, and says the variety takes well to a range of processing.³ Growers report it turns notably sweet under a tyoxidator protocol — an aerobic fermentation followed by an anaerobic one with the mucilage still on.³ The sweetness is the thing people repeat: a cooperative member quoted by PDG says simply that the coffee is “incredibly sweet, and that’s why people love it.”⁸

Where there are numbers, they come from the auction table above — 90.39 for the 2021 national champion, 90.07 for the third-place lot.¹ No published cupping dataset for the variety exists, and any score range quoted outside a competition record is seller copy. See Coffee scoring.

The market view, from the people who grow it, is that it could follow Sidra — and eventually Geisha — into broad recognition, on a twenty-to-twenty-five-year timescale.³ That is a prediction, not a trend.

Related

• Sidra — the sister variety with the same origin story, the same missing paperwork, and the same person credited
• Typica — the variety it is named after and is not descended from
• Bourbon · Bourbon-Typica group — the lineage the best-supported account puts it on
• Geisha — the plant it is compared to physically, and the trajectory its growers hope to follow
• Ecuador — its home origin, and where all three of its Cup of Excellence auctions sit
• Cup of Excellence · Alliance for Coffee Excellence · Cup of Excellence records by country — the competition that produced its only verified scores and prices
• World Barista Championship — where it reached the 2023 final
• World Coffee Research — the register that has no entry for it
• Nestlé — the company whose closed Ecuadorian breeding station sits at the centre of the unconfirmed origin story
• Honey process · Washed process · Anaerobic fermentation — the processing it is most often given
• Coffee scoring · Cupping — how its competition lots were judged
• Premiumisation — why a variety with no registry entry can still clear $97 a pound

Official links

• Official site — World Coffee Research Arabica variety catalogue — the authoritative variety register; note it carries no Typica Mejorado entry
• Official results — Alliance for Coffee Excellence, Ecuador 2021 — the competition and auction record behind every score and price on this page

Footnotes

1. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Ecuador 2021 results and auction — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the ranks, producers, regions, scores, top price and buyer ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

2. World Coffee Research — Arabica variety catalogue — confirmed via WebFetch; no Typica Mejorado, Typica Mejorada, Improved Typica or Sidra entry among the catalogued varieties ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. Perfect Daily Grind — What is Typica Mejorado and will it become more popular? — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the plant description, growing countries, Finca La Soledad, flavour notes and market outlook ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵

4. Qahwa World — Sidra and Typica Mejorado: origins, myths, and what we know — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the Bourbon × Ethiopian landrace claim, the Nanegal station dates, and the explicit statement that none of it is confirmed in peer-reviewed literature ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

5. Cafe Colombian Roast — Typica Mejorado: a special coffee variety thriving in Colombia ↩ ↩²

6. Doubleshot — Costa Rica Don Cayito Typica Mejorada — confirmed via WebFetch; roaster product page, source of the Tarrazú farm, altitude, white honey processing and the Calderón family ↩

7. Perfect Daily Grind (español) — ¿Qué es Typica Mejorada? ↩ ↩²

8. Perfect Daily Grind (português) — O que é Typica Mejorado e qual é o potencial de mercado dessa variedade ↩ ↩²