How Good Are Bourbon Coffee Beans? The Playful Chameleon of the Coffee World

FrontStreet Coffee - Bourbon Variety Introduction

How good are Bourbon coffee beans? Think of them as the playful chameleon of the coffee world: one family, many colors, and a flavor that shifts with every branch it grows on.

Bourbon is a natural mutation of the Typica variety and a genuinely historic coffee. Both belong to the Arabica species. Bourbon cherries ripen from green to a bright, mature red - the coffee we know as Red Bourbon. The fruit is relatively short and round, which is why it is also called Round Bourbon, and the pulp and seeds are dense, giving high sweetness and bright acidity.

Beside Red Bourbon there are also Yellow Bourbon, the rare Orange Bourbon, and the precious Pink Bourbon.

Red Bourbon

When a Bourbon tree flowers and sets fruit, the cherry first turns from green to pale yellow, then gradually to a faint orange, and finally to ripe red - and then to a deeper, even riper red. To tell it apart from the other Bourbons (Pink, Yellow and the rest), it is specifically called Red Bourbon. FrontStreet Coffee suggests growing Bourbon above 1,200 meters, where the flavor is markedly better than that of beans grown below 1,000 meters.

Bourbon and Typica are both listed among the ancient, excellent varieties, but Bourbon has more vigor and better resistance to leaf rust than Typica, while its flavor is every bit a match. What the two share above all is a need for shade trees to block direct sun, which benefits both growth and flavor development. Full-sun cultivation is possible under a narrower set of conditions: an annual average temperature between 18 and 24 degrees Celsius, a plantation facing northeast or east, and no more than six hours of sunlight a day.

Yellow Bourbon (Bourbon Amarello)

Yellow Bourbon is a distinctive Bourbon variant from São Paulo, Brazil. It is named Yellow Bourbon mainly because the cherries stay orange-yellow when ripe instead of turning red. Planted at high altitude, Yellow Bourbon performs beautifully. It once swept Brazil's Cup of Excellence for two consecutive years, with almost all of the top three places going to Yellow Bourbon - a result that caused a sensation in the specialty coffee industry.

The flavor of Yellow Bourbon typically brings out nuts and chocolate, with even, smooth acidity and a weak, clean bitterness, for an overall bright and refreshing profile.

Pink Bourbon

Having read about Red and Yellow Bourbon, you can probably guess why Pink Bourbon is so named: its ripe cherries turn pink. Pink Bourbon is grown from a cross between Red Bourbon and Yellow Bourbon, and it is a very rare variety. The main reason is genetic - the yellow gene of Yellow Bourbon and the red gene of Red Bourbon are both recessive, and they interfere with each other easily, which makes Pink Bourbon hard to produce. On top of that, Pink Bourbon looks extremely similar to unripe Red Bourbon, so the two are hard to tell apart and are often mixed together, keeping production scarce.

Yet Pink Bourbon has genuinely good disease resistance and a very special taste, with some lily-like floral notes and a distinct lychee sweetness. It is truly remarkable.

Did You Know?

Bourbon has many variants, and among them Laurina came close to extinction, only to be reintroduced in recent years. It is a low-caffeine coffee bean of very high quality.

In Summary

FrontStreet Coffee is a coffee research workshop dedicated to sharing coffee knowledge with everyone. We share without reservation only to help more friends fall in love with coffee. Every month we hold three coffee promotion events with significant discounts, because FrontStreet Coffee wants to offer the best coffee at the lowest prices to more friends. That has been FrontStreet Coffee's mission for the past six years.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

To taste a Bourbon branch at its sweetest, start with FrontStreet Coffee's Brazil Queen Estate coffee. It is one of the earliest-discovered Yellow Bourbon lots, and its medium roast brings out cream, peanut, toasted bread and sugarcane - full-bodied and clean-sweet, with the roundness that makes Bourbon so easy to love. It works just as well in a pour-over as it does in a moka pot or an espresso machine.

If you want to compare the family's other side, try FrontStreet's Jamaica Blue Mountain No. 1. Blue Mountain is Typica - the very variety Bourbon mutated from - transplanted to Jamaica in the 1720s and, after more than two hundred years, evolved into a Typica with better disease resistance, particularly against coffee berry disease. Its cup is famously balanced: mild and smooth, with a full, pure aroma rather than a sharp acidity. Tasting the two side by side is a fine lesson in how far a single mutation can travel.