Varieties.
A concise field guide to the names in the book. Variety sets the context; the cup and the place still decide each lot.
Tiny volumes, and gone when they are gone.
Gesha
The famous stone2 lots on offerAlso written Geisha. The house keeps one spelling, and each lot carries its own score.
02Maragogipe
The large beanA nineteenth-century Typica mutation recognised first by scale.
03Bourbon Aruzi
A scarcity lot1 lot on offerA Bourbon-type selection from Inzá, bought only against a confirmed sample.
04Ombligón
A scarcity lot1 lot on offerA distinctive Colombian selection released in very small counts.
The named varieties roasters ask for by name. Pink Bourbon and Chiroso are the two worth owning outright; Sidra is the most fashionable; Tabi cups above its price.
Pink Bourbon
The flagship3 lots on offerA Colombian name that survived long enough for genetics to correct the record.
06Chiroso
The Antioquian original2 lots on offerOne town, one valley, one name that the wider trade learned late.
07Tabi
The hidden stoneA Colombian research line whose name means good in Namtrik, the language of the Misak.
08Sidra
The quiet signal1 lot on offerAn Ecuadorian emergence now finding a distinct expression in Colombia.
The everyday washed coffees. Caturra and Castillo are the workhorses that anchor accounts; Typica and Red Bourbon are the classical varieties that sit alongside them.
Caturra
The workhorseThe compact tree behind much of Colombia's twentieth-century coffee.
10Castillo
The modern Colombian lineCenicafé's rust-tolerant answer, judged here by the cup rather than reputation.
11Red Bourbon
The heritage lineFrom Yemen to Réunion, then through Brazil into the Americas.
12Typica
The old lineA lineage carried through one of coffee's narrowest historical passages.
How the names relate.
Most of the book comes from two sources: the Ethiopian LandraceA variety shaped by farmers and place rather than by a breeding programme. Most of the Ethiopian lines grown in Colombia, Gesha, Chiroso and Pink Bourbon among them, are landraces.More →, and the Bourbon-Typica group carried out of Yemen. CenicaféThe federation's research centre at Chinchiná, Caldas, since 1938. It bred Colombia, Castillo and Tabi, and publishes the trials the house cites.More →'s crosses bring in the Timor HybridA spontaneous cross of arabica and robusta found on Timor in the 1920s. The source of leaf rust resistance in Castillo, Tabi and most modern bred varieties.More → for rust tolerance. Two names the record cannot yet place sit apart. Each gold name opens its field guide.
- Time runs left to rightdown the page, oldest first, by the year each name was first recorded.
- Solid line: descent by selection or mutation.
- Double line: a cross, with the Timor Hybrid.
- Dotted line: unplaced. The record does not say.
- A gold name opens its field guide.
Prize lots cost 6 times their 2005 price.
- Average prize lot
- Cheapest to dearest
- Everyday green coffee beans
Source: Cup of Excellence, Stats NZ · 2005 to 2023
- Alliance for Coffee Excellence, public results
- Stats NZ, CC BY 4.0
- FRED exchange rates, public domain
Prize lots: Cup of Excellence, Colombia's national competition, where the top-scoring green coffee beans are sold at an online auction. Winning bids in Colombia, before shipping, at each year's average exchange rate.
Everyday green coffee beans: the average value of green coffee beans imported into New Zealand from Colombia that year, with freight and insurance, before GST.
No auction was held in 2016, and none since 2023.
