Apples are all apples, and a Granny Smith is not a Braeburn. Coffee works the same way. There is one plant — arabica — and then there are dozens of types of it, bred or stumbled upon over a few hundred years, and they taste properly different from one another.
The trade calls those types varieties, or sometimes “cultivars,” which means the same thing and sounds more expensive. You’ll see one named on better bags of coffee, in small print, usually near the country. Most people have no idea what it means and there is no reason they should.
It’s worth about four minutes, though, because it’s the single best predictor of what a coffee will taste like before you buy it — better than the country, and much better than the roast level.
Six you’ll actually see
Typica.One of the oldest, and the ancestor of a great many others. Grows badly and produces very little, which is why it’s rare now. Tastes clean and sweet, chocolate and hazelnut, soft in the mouth.
Bourbon.Named after the island — now called Réunion — and carried to Latin America by French missionaries. Grows a bit better than Typica and catches everything going. Worth the trouble: caramel, red fruit, and forgiving to brew.
Caturra.A Bourbon that spontaneously turned up short in Brazil, which sounds trivial and isn’t — short plants can be packed in tightly and picked without a ladder. Colombia and Costa Rica are full of it. Brighter and sharper than Bourbon, with less of the caramel.
SL28.Kenya’s famous one, and the reason people get evangelical about Kenyan coffee — blackcurrant, enormous structure, and an acidity that does not apologize for itself. Selected at Scott Laboratories in Nairobi in the 1930s, which is where the initials come from.
Gesha.Collected in the Gesha area of Ethiopia and then ignored for decades, until somebody planted it high up in Panama and it turned out to be astonishing — jasmine, bergamot, more like tea than coffee. It is also the most expensive coffee most people will ever be offered, for exactly that reason.
Pacamara. A deliberate cross made in El Salvador, with absurdly large beans. Tropical fruit, berries and chocolate, with real weight behind it.
And “Ethiopian heirloom”
You’ll see that phrase on bags. It’s a catch-all covering thousands of local Ethiopian varieties, many of them unnamed and growing half-wild, and it means roughly “we don’t know which ones are in here.” That’s not a criticism. Nobody knows.
The fact worth carrying: arabica comes from Ethiopia. It travelled out through Yemen, which is where the rest of the world first met it and why Yemen turns up in so many origin stories. Ethiopia is where the plant is from; Yemen was the port.
You don’t have to remember any of this
Genuinely. The only useful outcome is that next time one bag says Caturra and the one beside it says SL28, you’ll have some idea why they taste like two different drinks — and which of them you’re in the mood for.
There are fourteen of these written up properly over in The Lineup, each one pinned to somewhere in California so there’s something to hang it on. We never rate them, because a Bourbon grown badly is worse than a Catimor grown brilliantly, and the variety on the label is only ever half the story.
Do you know what’s in your cupboard right now? Go and look. We’ll wait.