Bourbon Aruzi appears in the house sourcing book among the smallest releases. It is a regional selection rather than a registered variety, and the Lot recordThe house's own account of a lot: ground, grower, process, harvest, score and who scored it. A record kept by the house, not an independent grading.More → says so, because uncertain claims do not survive there.
The house brings it in By commissionBought to order against a deposit, not held in New Zealand.More →, counted and assigned before it leaves origin.
The trade story
The account that travels with this coffee begins in Inzá, Cauca, where a farmer noticed trees that carried more fruit and shrugged off disease better than their neighbours, and propagated them. Seed was later sent to a laboratory in London, which is said to have found genetics resembling a Bourbon type from Ethiopia. The name followed from that. It has since spread to a handful of producers, among them Jairo Arcila at Santa Mónica, Clinton Ossa, William Andrés Olivera and Alexis Silva in Gigante.
The house passes that on as a trade story, because that is what it is. It comes from one marketing source, repeated since without independent confirmation.
What the registers say
Nothing. Bourbon Aruzi appears in no variety register: not World Coffee ResearchThe research institute whose variety catalogue is the trade's reference for lineage, bean size and resistance. The house cites it where it has an entry, and says so where it does not.More →, whose catalogue does list several Bourbon-lineage East African selections, and not CenicaféThe federation's research centre at Chinchiná, Caldas, since 1938. It bred Colombia, Castillo and Tabi, and publishes the trials the house cites.More →, nor the research institutes of Ethiopia or Tanzania. No laboratory is named in the origin story and no report was published. The two versions in circulation contradict each other, one describing an Ethiopian import and the other a mutation found in Cauca.
There is a further wrinkle. Ethiopia does not grow Bourbon-named varieties, so an Ethiopian Bourbon is an odd thing to find; Bourbon is a Réunion line. Aruzi may well garble Arusi, which is a place in Ethiopia rather than a coffee.
How the house sells it
As what it is: an unidentified Bourbon-type selection from Inzá, genetics under study, bought against a confirmed sample and sold by the piece. Real lots, real scores, a pedigree that has not been established. The cup is consistently pretty and the washed versions are the ones with a track record worth citing.
This matters more than it might seem. Work published in 2026 found that only thirty-nine per cent of coffee sold globally as Gesha matched the Gesha reference genotype, and that more than a third of Latin American seed lots showed very high genetic non-compliance. Variety names are among the least reliable things on a bag. A name with no reference genotype cannot be authenticated even in principle, and the house would rather say that than print a lineage it cannot stand behind.
The first lots
31 prize lots: NZ$44 to NZ$269 a kilo.
Source: Cup of Excellence, Stats NZ · 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.