Catimor Coffee Beans: Flavor Profile, Grind Settings, Taste Characteristics, Origin Regions, and Variety Guide

FrontStreet Coffee · Flavor Description, Grinding Settings, Taste Profile, Origin, and Variety Introduction of Catimor Coffee Beans

Although there are increasingly many Arabica coffee varieties today, the Catimor variety has long been favored by coffee growers in Asia. There are many reasons for its popularity: cold resistance, strong disease resistance, and high yield are the main factors. However, the drawbacks are that Catimor has a short lifespan, and its coffee flavor performance is not particularly rich, with a less refined mouthfeel.

Therefore, when Catimor is mentioned in specialty coffee circles, people tend to have different opinions. However, with significant improvements in coffee cultivation and post-processing methods in recent years, the flavor cleanliness of Catimor coffee has also improved, leading to an enhanced image for Catimor in recent years.

What is Catimor Coffee?

FrontStreet Coffee has learned that, like many delicious and fascinating varieties cherished in the specialty coffee world (such as Pacamara and SL28), Catimor is a variety created in a laboratory setting—quite unromantic. On one side of its pedigree is Caturra, a natural mutation of the Bourbon variety from Brazil. On the other side is Hibrido de Timor (or "Timor Hybrid" or "Tim Tim"), a peculiar result of the only known natural mating between a Canephora (a type of Robusta) plant and an Arabica plant, which occurred in the early 1900s on Timor Island in Southeast Asia.

Because it incorporates Robusta genes, some people believe that Catimor is not technically an Arabica variety. However, from the coffee growers' perspective, cash crops should involve low costs but high yields. Nevertheless, as consumers have developed higher expectations for coffee flavor, greater attention has been paid to the cultivation of Catimor and the coffee bean extraction process.

Some coffee cultivation research scholars indicate that as long as Catimor is grown in high-altitude areas with mild climates and sufficient rainfall, and the surrounding environment is kept clean during coffee processing, the astringency and unpleasant flavors inherent to the Catimor variety can be effectively reduced.

Is Yunnan Catimor Small Bean Coffee Good to Drink?

It's believed that most people first heard about Yunnan coffee through the Catimor variety. Although Yunnan has a hundred-year history of coffee cultivation, it didn't originally grow Catimor coffee. The first coffee tree brought to Yunnan by a French missionary in 1904 was later genetically confirmed to be the Typica variety. However, at that time, the coffee variety wasn't recorded as "Typica" but instead used the morphological description of Arabica coffee fruits, "small bean coffee," as the record.

Later, for a period, because the country needed to repay Soviet loans, coffee farmers in the Yunnan region began large-scale cultivation of Typica coffee trees. However, after repayment was completed, due to limited domestic coffee demand, many farmers cut down their coffee trees and switched to other economically beneficial crops. It wasn't until the 1990s when Nestlé identified Yunnan as this precious land and distributed Catimor variety coffee trees that could better resist leaf rust disease that people began replanting coffee trees, continuously supplying them to Nestlé.

When primarily supplying Nestlé, coffee farmers didn't cultivate their crops meticulously, and the entire coffee bean extraction and drying process wasn't particularly refined. Consequently, for the first 20 years, Yunnan coffee's flavor was not as desirable as hoped—it wasn't pleasant to drink directly, leading to a poor impression of Yunnan coffee.

However, as consumer demand for coffee increased, Yunnan coffee producers and sellers realized the need to adopt scientific cultivation methods and make the extraction and drying processes more refined to achieve a cleaner flavor profile for Yunnan coffee. Simultaneously, with the maturation of special processing techniques in recent years, people began applying these methods to Yunnan Catimor coffee beans, altering undesirable flavors through external intervention, leading to gradual consumer acceptance of Yunnan coffee.

Although scientific cultivation and improved post-processing methods have made Yunnan coffee much better, FrontStreet Coffee believes that the inherently unpleasant flavors of Catimor still exist, merely masked by more scientific cultivation and post-processing techniques. The significance of specialty coffee lies in improving quality. Simply emphasizing post-processing improvements without changing the cultivation variety and altitude seems somewhat forced and doesn't align with the true meaning of specialty coffee.

Therefore, FrontStreet Coffee chose to establish its own plantation in 2013, cultivating the Typica coffee variety. The choice of Typica was based on several factors: as one of the most ancient coffee varieties, it possesses pure Arabica genetic makeup and has long been recognized as a specialty coffee variety due to its elegant and clean flavor profile.

Although until 2022, FrontStreet Coffee's Yunnan Typica coffee beans were not abundant—only over 600 kilograms, enough to supply FrontStreet Coffee's Taobao store and physical retail locations—it is only through personally experiencing the entire process that one can identify shortcomings and continuously improve. Also, due to the change in coffee variety, "FrontStreet Coffee 2013 Yunnan Typica Coffee Beans," despite using traditional natural processing, exhibits a full and enticing flavor profile with notes of plum, berries, brown sugar, black tea, and nuts.

Although FrontStreet Coffee cultivates Yunnan Typica coffee, FrontStreet Coffee also sells a Catimor coffee bean from the Yunnan Baoshan region. As part of FrontStreet Coffee's signature daily brew series, this Yunnan small bean coffee allows everyone to experience Yunnan regional flavors at the highest cost-performance ratio. Its flavor profile features the characteristic plum acidity of the Yunnan region, the caramelized sweetness of brown sugar, and the aroma of melon and fruits.

How to Brew Yunnan Coffee Beans for Great Taste?

All coffee beans sold by FrontStreet Coffee are shipped within five days of the roasting date, as only freshly roasted coffee beans can showcase the best flavors of coffee! To preserve the sweet-sour balance and tea-like characteristics of Yunnan coffee, FrontStreet Coffee applies a medium roast to it.

FrontStreet Coffee recommends using a V60 dripper with a 1:15 coffee-to-water ratio, medium grind (approximately coarse sugar size/75% retention rate on China #20 standard sieve), and water temperature of 88-89°C, combined with a three-stage pouring method for brewing.

For the first pour, use 30g of water and let it bloom for 30 seconds. For the second stage, pour in a small circular motion until reaching 125g, wait until the water level in the coffee bed drops to half, then continue pouring in a small circular motion until reaching 225g. After complete drip filtration, the total extraction time should be approximately 2 minutes and 10 seconds.

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