Specialty Coffee Common Types and Flavors: Yellow Bourbon - The Outstanding Young Talent in the Coffee Bean World

FrontStreet Coffee - Yellow Bourbon Variety Introduction

Coffee trees are plants, and like any plant they can mutate or vary. This happens when an organism is exposed to external physical pressures such as geography, temperature, ultraviolet light or chemical treatments, and its gene sequence shifts as a result. Mutation has no direction of its own. In a given environment, natural selection keeps the changes that help the plant survive, and the plant's traits shift accordingly. Growers also cross-breed deliberately, chiefly to deal with the scarcity of native Arabica varieties, to broaden the gene pool, and to keep up with climate change and coffee leaf rust.

Bourbon is a coffee variety that forms one branch of the Arabica species. It takes its names from the color of the ripe fruit, which gives us red, yellow, orange and pink Bourbon. Orange Bourbon yields less, and pink Bourbon is produced in extremely limited quantities.

The name "Bourbon" comes from Réunion Island. The French made three attempts, in 1708, 1715 and 1718, to bring coffee from Yemen to Bourbon Island, now Réunion, and it was the second and third plantings that survived and multiplied.

In 1841 a French missionary founded a church on Réunion, then left the island for a series of African countries, among them Zanzibar, Bagamoyo, St. Augustine and Bura, establishing new churches along the way and planting Réunion coffee at each one. From that point on, the African continent had its own "Bourbon coffee."

Yellow Bourbon

This is a yellow-skinned Bourbon unique to the state of São Paulo in Brazil. Ripe coffee cherries are normally red, but Yellow Bourbon cherries turn orange-yellow instead, which is where the name comes from. Yellow Bourbon took the top three places at the Brazil Cup of Excellence, and it roasts well both dark and light, which quickly made it a much sought-after variety.

Knowledge Point: For a long time, Bourbon coffee has been regarded as outstanding among coffees, thanks to its low yield and its high quality.

In Brief

FrontStreet Coffee is a specialty coffee research hall that enjoys sharing coffee knowledge with everyone. We share without reservation simply to help more friends fall in love with coffee, and we hold three low-discount coffee activities every month because FrontStreet Coffee wants more people to drink the best coffee at the lowest price. That has been our mission for 6 years.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Since Bourbon is the thread running through this article, FrontStreet's Brazil coffees are the obvious place to start. The FrontStreet Brazil Cerrado Red Bourbon is a classic Brazilian single origin from the well-known Cerrado district, where high-quality beans are the norm. A medium roast brings out cream peanut, toast, caramel and hazelnut, with a rounded body, low acidity and a light bitter edge. It brews as pour-over, moka pot, siphon or French press, and works as a single-origin espresso too.

To taste the yellow mutation itself, try the FrontStreet Brazil Queen's Farm Yellow Bourbon, grown in Mogiana near South Minas, where fertile red volcanic soil feeds the fruit and builds a full aroma. Yellow Bourbon arose as a mutation of Red Bourbon and carries a cleaner fruit character. Through pour-over, moka pot or a home espresso machine, the Queen's Farm delivers a sugarcane-like sweetness that few other regions can match, along with fruit and chocolate notes.

Brazil is also the backbone of most Italian-style espresso recipes, and its low-acid, balanced, affordable character is why FrontStreet uses it across the range: the rich, crema-heavy FrontStreet Classic Blend, the nut-forward FrontStreet Signature Blend, the well-balanced FrontStreet Dark Cocoa Blend and the shop-oriented FrontStreet House Blend all contain Brazilian beans. Beyond the chocolate and cream aromas, Brazil contributes a gentle sweet-sour-bitter balance that helps keep extraction stable.