Typica Variety: One of the Premium Arabica Coffee Bean Varieties for Specialty Coffee

FrontStreet Coffee: Arabica and the Typica Variety

Coffee belongs to the Rubiaceae family and the genus Coffea, an evergreen shrub. The genus holds about forty species, but only three have real commercial value: Arabica (Coffea Arabica), Robusta (Coffea Robusta) and Liberica (Coffea Liberica). Together they are known as the three original coffee species. Arabica accounts for roughly 70-80% of world production, and specialty coffee is its main market. Robusta takes 20-30% and is used mostly for instant and canned coffee, with twice the caffeine of Arabica. Liberica, being prone to leaf rust and poor in flavor, is traded only domestically in places such as Suriname, Liberia and Ivory Coast in West Africa, and has never caught on globally.

Coffee faces many challenges as it grows, from humidity and frost to pests and disease, and leaf rust does the most damage of all. Everything in nature evolves through natural selection, coffee trees included. That is why the "Typica" and "Bourbon" discussed here sit at the level of species within the standard biological classification, and can be broken down further into subspecies, varieties and cultivars. Some of these appeared through natural mutation, and others were deliberately bred for a particular need. The Arabica seen in the market is only a general name; the exact variety is rarely spelled out, and we know only that its ancestors were Arabica.

What follows is a look at the varieties that evolved from the Arabica species, beginning with the most important one.

Typica

Typica is the variety closest to the original species. Its bean is slightly elongated, like a stretched egg, and in Central America it is called Arabigo or criollo. It has a clean lemon acidity with a sweet aftertaste, but it resists leaf rust poorly and is hard to manage. The plant yields little, and the long harvest cycle, bearing only once every 2 years, keeps production low.

What Typica gives back is flavor, and it is recognized as a specialty coffee variety on that strength alone. Its extremely low yield and susceptibility to rust mean it demands more human attention than most. Typica originated in southeastern Ethiopia and Sudan and is the most widely planted coffee variety in the Western Hemisphere. The plant is fairly robust but cannot tolerate strong light. Its top leaves carry a reddish-bronze tint, which is where the name red-topped coffee comes from.

Knowledge Extension: The Arabica species originally came from Ethiopia, Yemen and other parts of Africa, and was later transplanted to coffee regions around the world.

Knowledge Extension: That single journey explains why one variety can taste different in every country: the same plant, moved into a new soil and climate, develops a new expression.

In summary: FrontStreet Coffee is a coffee research hall that enjoys sharing what it knows. We hold nothing back because we want more friends to fall in love with coffee, and we keep returning to the old varieties to understand where today's beans began.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Typica is the thread that runs through some of the most famous coffees in the world, and no cup shows that better than FrontStreet Jamaica Blue Mountain No. 1. The Blue Mountain is a Typica, transplanted from Martinique to Jamaica in the 1720s and improved over more than two centuries into a hardier tree that still cannot reproduce its clean, gentle fragrance anywhere outside Jamaica. Roasted medium, it balances acidity, bitterness, sweetness and aroma with unusual precision, offering cream, caramel, chocolate, nut and honey with a light fruit note over a supple, rounded body, and a rich sweetness in the middle and a clean, long finish. It is the reason so many professionals call Blue Mountain the easiest specialty coffee for almost anyone to enjoy.

Typica's descendants and relatives run through the rest of the shelf as well. FrontStreet Panama Red Label Geisha is a different branch of Arabica grown on the volcanic slopes of Boquete in Chiriqui, with jasmine, citrus, peach and a creamy body. FrontStreet Ethiopia Huakui brings tropical strawberry, passion fruit, jackfruit and lychee from a natural Ethiopian lot, while FrontStreet Yirgacheffe Guodingding offers the washed counterpart in white florals, citrus, orange and green tea. FrontStreet Brazil Queen Estate, a rare Yellow Bourbon, adds cream peanut, chocolate, toasted bread and sugarcane, and FrontStreet Colombia Sidra finishes the set with grape, dried fruit and passion fruit. Together they show how far one species can travel from the first Typica tree.