Coffee Varieties: Think Wine Grapes, Not Brands

Nobody walks into a wine shop and asks for “red.” You ask for Pinot Noir or Cabernet, because you know the grape changes everything. Coffee works exactly the same way — we just never taught anybody the grape names. Consider this your first tasting flight.

The old families: Typica and Bourbon

Almost every coffee tree in the Americas descends from two ancestral varieties that left Ethiopia centuries ago. Typica is the elder — elegant, sweet, clean, and famously low-yielding. Bourbon (named for the island, not the whiskey) is its slightly more generous sibling — rounder, sweeter, the backbone of classic Latin American flavor. Think of them as coffee's Chardonnay and Pinot: the parents of nearly everything else.

The working varieties we roast

• Caturra — a compact natural mutation of Bourbon: bright, snappy, and easier to harvest. You've tasted it in our Colombian collaboration lots.
• Catuai — a Brazilian cross bred for sturdiness; sweet, nutty, dependable. A workhorse in our Brazilian coffees.
• Castillo and Colombia — varieties bred in Colombia to resist coffee leaf rust, a fungus that can erase a farm in a season. Early versions traded away some cup quality; modern lots — like the Castillo Andrés grows on our farm project — prove disease resistance and deliciousness can coexist.
• SL28 — selected in Kenya in the 1930s and still one of the most electric cups on earth: blackcurrant, tomato-vine brightness, unmistakable. The Syrah of coffee.

The wild library: Ethiopian landraces

Ethiopia is coffee's birthplace, and its forests hold thousands of uncatalogued native varieties — collectively called landraces, or simply “heirloom” on menus. It's why Ethiopian coffees can taste like jasmine, like peaches, like Earl Grey tea — flavors from genetics no breeding program invented. Our Yirgacheffe lots are a walk through that wild library.

The apple test

Still skeptical that variety matters? Groceries run the same experiment daily: a Honeycrisp and a Red Delicious are both “apples,” and they are not the same experience. Same species, different variety, wildly different eating. Coffee's differences are at least that large — we've just been sold “coffee” the way nobody would accept being sold “apple.”

Next time you grab a bag, find the variety on the label and start collecting tasting memories. Somewhere between a Bourbon's caramel and an SL28's blackcurrant, coffee stops being a beverage and becomes a hobby.