UK-St. Helena Island: Dissemination and Brewing of St. Helena Green Tipped Bourbon Arabica Coffee?

St. Helena Green-Tipped Bourbon Arabica: How Coffee Spread from Britain's Remote South Atlantic Island—and How to Brew It

For deeper coffee knowledge and more single-origin bean introductions, follow FrontStreet Coffee, where we share brewing guides and green bean stories from around the coffee world.

What makes St. Helena coffee special is not simply that it is pure Arabica. It belongs to the Bourbon family of Arabica—specifically Green Tipped Bourbon, a variety that demands exceptional care at every stage of harvesting, washing, and roasting if its remarkable character is to survive intact. Because the island's output is tiny and the price correspondingly steep, most serious coffee drinkers know St. Helena only by reputation, a bean they dream of trying rather than one they keep on the shelf. And yet these green-tipped Bourbon trees, descended from Yemeni stock brought over in the eighteenth century, produce some of the most expensive and beguiling coffee in the world.

The story begins on February 10, 1733, when the East India Company delivered coffee seeds to Saint Helena. A ship calling at the port of Mocha in Yemen carried Green Tipped Bourbon seeds, and once planted across the island they thrived with remarkably little attention. The coffee's first brush with fame came when Napoleon was exiled to Saint Helena from 1815 to 1821; his enthusiastic praise for the island's coffee drew global attention, and for a time it became fashionable in Paris.

Napoleon remains the most celebrated admirer of Saint Helena coffee. He died on the island in 1821, and during his six years of exile he lived in a house plagued by rats. Legend has it that he declared coffee the "only good thing" about Saint Helena.

In 1839, the London coffee merchant Wm Burnie & Co introduced it to the trade: "We present St. Helena coffee to our peers, and its quality and flavor have won unanimous praise."

By 1845, St. Helena coffee commanded the top price in the London market—one penny per pound—making it the most expensive and distinctive coffee in the world at the time.

In 1851, at The Great Exhibition in London, coffee grown on the Bamboo Hedge estate won over the judges.

Saint Helena still holds remnants of the trees the British East India Company planted nearly 300 years ago, though the island's plantations were later abandoned. When David R. Henry visited in 1986, he was fortunate enough to taste the island's coffee alongside the Governor of Saint Helena. That batch came from a very limited planting at Plantation House, the Governor's residence—also home to Jonathan, a 260-year-old tortoise (pictured below) who has watched the whole story unfold. In the 1990s, enthusiastic growers attempted a revival, but it collapsed when the main producer went bankrupt; even shipping beans to Harrods in London failed to save the venture.

Then came an unusually romantic chapter. On October 16, 1996, the Endeavour Replica, a faithful reproduction of an age-of-sail vessel, departed Fremantle, Australia on a world tour, arriving at Saint Helena on January 26, 1997 for a four-day stay. Once ashore, David R. Henry asked Captain Chris Blake to carry St. Helena coffee to Greenwich, London by nineteenth-century routes and methods. The captain agreed, and bags of coffee were loaded aboard with ropes and pulleys, exactly as they would have been two centuries earlier. The crew enjoyed their visit to the island and later documented the journey on their website.

On January 30, 1997, the Endeavour Replica set sail for the UK with its cargo of St. Helena coffee. On March 25, 1997, watched by crowds and press, she arrived in London up the Thames. David R. Henry received the coffee at the dock and hosted a public event in Greenwich with the customers who had bought the green beans—Mitsubishi, Harrods, and Whittard of Chelsea. To mark the ship's arrival, Wedgewood created a distinctive ivy-patterned coffee canister filled with St. Helena coffee, which the two companies jointly presented to the British Queen.

The Wedgewood connection runs deeper than it looks. During restoration of Napoleon's estate on Saint Helena, shards of original ivy-patterned Wedgewood tableware were uncovered—evidence that during his exile, the French court had commissioned Wedgewood to make ivy-patterned tea and coffee services for Napoleon.

On January 14, 1998, the Endeavour Replica continued from Plymouth, UK toward North America, calling at Tenerife in Spain, the British Virgin Islands, and the Bahamas before reaching West Palm Beach, Florida on March 5, 1998.

The coffee sold by the Saint Helena Island Coffee Company, founded by David R. Henry, traces directly back to the seeds brought to the island in 1733. Once the plantations were rehabilitated, the descendants of those trees—whose forebears supplied exports to Britain 150 years ago—returned to production. Over the past decade, coffee connoisseurs worldwide have come to know St. Helena coffee and fallen for its singular character. With new plantings developed successfully and capacity steadily growing, the Saint Helena Island Coffee Company now proudly offers its estate coffee to the world.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommended Brewing:

Grind size: 3.5 (Japan Fuji R440)

Water temperature: 90°C

V60 dripper, 15g of coffee, water at 90°C, grind setting 3.5, water-to-coffee ratio of roughly 1:15

Technique: bloom with 30g of water for 30 seconds

Pouring stages: pour up to 120g, pause, then resume with a slightly heavier flow to 221g

In short, a 30-120-221 schedule, with total extraction time of 1:50 to 2 minutes.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

If the story of St. Helena's Green Tipped Bourbon has you craving another taste of this storied variety, FrontStreet Coffee's Brazil Queen Estate (Fazenda Rainha) Yellow Bourbon is a natural next stop. Bourbon is one of the oldest Arabica varieties, named after the island of Bourbon where it was first planted, and the yellow-fruited mutation found at Queen Estate is among the earliest ever identified. In the cup it delivers cream, peanut, toasted bread, and sugarcane sweetness—rich, mellow, and clean, without a hint of harshness.

Like St. Helena coffee, Yellow Bourbon rewards gentle brewing. FrontStreet roasts it to a medium profile to protect that soft sugared character, and it is forgiving enough to shine through every method: hand-poured pour-over for clarity, a moka pot for body, or an espresso machine for a round, sweet shot. For drinkers who want the Bourbon lineage in a more accessible form than St. Helena's rare and pricey beans, Queen Estate offers remarkable quality for the price.