How to Distinguish Bourbon Coffee Beans - Hybrid Varieties Prove Superior Among Bourbon Lineage

Bourbon is one of the variety names a curious drinker meets early and rarely understands at once. It is not a drink, a place or a roast; it is a family of coffee trees whose mutations and hybrids now fill much of Latin America. This is how to tell its members apart.

FrontStreet Coffee: An Introduction to Bourbon Coffee Varieties

Bourbon

Bourbon is a genetic mutation of the original Typica that appeared on Réunion Island. It is also the parent, and sometimes the grandparent, of many popular Latin American types, among them Caturra, Catuai, Pacas and Mundo Novo. Bourbon remains widely planted in Latin America today and has crossed the ocean to Africa as well, taking root in Rwanda and Burundi. Ripe Bourbon fruit is usually red, though yellow and orange versions exist. Bourbon yields roughly 20% to 30% more than Typica, and although its flavor is a little sweeter and sometimes better balanced, the two varieties are broadly similar.

Next to Typica, Bourbon plants carry broader leaves and grow more densely. Production is higher than Typica, but the tree still takes 2 years to bear, which keeps it a low-yield variety overall. What it gives back is quality: a wine-like acidity and a sweet aftertaste. The beans run large and uniform, evenly colored with a glossy surface. To make picking easier, growers prune the trees so they never exceed 150 centimeters.

Typical Bourbon fruit develops from green to a ripe, bright red, which is the coffee we know as Red Bourbon. The fruit is short and round, which is why it is also called Round Bourbon, with dense flesh and seed, high sweetness and bright acidity. Beyond Red Bourbon there are Yellow Bourbon, the rarer Orange Bourbon and the rarest of all, Pink Bourbon.

Red Bourbon

Why call it Red Bourbon when Bourbon alone would do?

The original Bourbon trees, once they flower and fruit, move from green to pale yellow, then gradually to light orange, and finally to ripe red and fully ripe deep red. To separate the classic form from later variants such as Pink Bourbon and Yellow Bourbon, it is specified as Red Bourbon. Bourbon is best grown above 1200 meters, where its flavor is markedly better than the same variety planted below 1000 meters.

Yellow Bourbon (Bourbon Amarello)

Yellow Bourbon is a distinct form first found in São Paulo, Brazil. It takes its name because the fruit stays orange-yellow at maturity instead of turning red. Grown at high altitude, Yellow Bourbon shows excellent flavor. It dominated Brazil's Cup of Excellence for two consecutive years, with the top three places almost entirely taken by Yellow Bourbon, a result that caused a stir in the specialty world. Yellow Bourbon typically offers nutty and chocolate flavors, an even, smooth acidity and a faint, clean bitterness, leaving an overall bright and refreshing impression.

Pink Bourbon

After Red and Yellow, it follows that Pink Bourbon takes its name from pink ripe fruit. Pink Bourbon is a hybrid raised from Red Bourbon and Yellow Bourbon, which makes it extremely rare. The rarity comes down to genetics: the yellow genes of Yellow Bourbon and the red genes of Red Bourbon are both recessive and interfere with one another easily, so the pink form is hard to produce. On top of that, Pink Bourbon looks very much like unripe Red Bourbon, so the two are difficult to separate and often end up mixed, which further holds yields down. Pink Bourbon is in fact quite resistant to disease and has a very distinctive flavor, with lily-like floral notes and a prominent lychee sweetness. It is remarkable coffee.

Knowledge Point

Arabica is generally believed to have originated in the Ethiopian highlands and is now distributed throughout the tropics. Repeated mutation and breeding have given rise to the many varieties we know today.

In Summary

FrontStreet Coffee is a coffee research center that enjoys sharing what we know with everyone. We hold nothing back because we want more friends to fall in love with coffee, and we are always looking for the varieties that make that easy.

Understanding the Bourbon line is one of the fastest ways to read a coffee label, because so many of the beans on the shelf trace back to it.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Bourbon's descendants are not the only place to find bright, layered coffee, and for drinkers who follow acidity rather than body, the light-roast floral lots are the natural next step. FrontStreet Yirgacheffe Guodingding is the classic entry point. A washed Ethiopian coffee from the Guodingding cooperative, it brings citrus, berry and floral notes with a green-tea sweetness, and its acidity is soft and bright rather than sharp, the fruit's own tang instead of a rough edge, which makes it unusually easy for a newcomer to accept.

FrontStreet Ethiopia Huakui pushes the same fruit in a more tropical direction. This naturally processed Ethiopian coffee shows strawberry, passion fruit, jackfruit and even lychee, with marked sweetness and almost no bitterness, so smooth and juicy that drinkers often call it the coffee that tastes least like coffee. For a more vivid, structured cup, FrontStreet Kenya Cherry Tomato is a Kenyan washed lot from Thika at 1550-1750 meters, with SL28 and SL34, 72-hour double washed fermentation and a light roast, delivering cherry tomato and dark-plum acidity, pear and black plum, and a clean finish of yellow sugar and green tea. FrontStreet Ethiopia Kafa Forest closes the circle: grown in the Kafa Biosphere Reserve, the region widely recognized as the birthplace of Arabica, at 1400-2100 meters, it carries jasmine, citrus and wild berry from trees that have evolved for millennia. All four reward a light hand and a little patience.