Caturra is a natural dwarf mutation of Bourbon found in Brazil around 1915. Its compact stature allowed dense planting and made it central to Colombia's twentieth-century coffee expansion.
The house looks for high-grown WashedDepulped within hours of picking, held in a tank until the mucilage loosens, washed clean and dried. The method Colombia built its name on.More → Caturra with enough precision to carry a regional lot without losing the hillside beneath it.
A small tree with consequences
Caturra is a Bourbon that stopped growing. A single dominant gene shortens the spaces between nodes, and the result is a compact tree that can be planted at five to six thousand to the hectare and picked without ladders. The name comes from Guarani and means small.
The Instituto Agronômico at Campinas took it up from 1937 and selected the red and yellow forms that spread through Latin America. In Colombia it underwrote most of the twentieth-century expansion. It bears in its third year, a year ahead of Typica or Bourbon, and it is hungry: high nutrition demand is the price of the yield.
What it is not
Caturra has low resistance to Leaf rustHemileia vastatrix, la roya: the fungus that strips arabica of its leaves. Colombia's breeding programme exists to resist it, which is why Castillo and Tabi carry Timor Hybrid lines.More →. This is worth stating plainly because the opposite is widely assumed, and because it is the whole reason Colombia spent decades breeding replacements. Nematodes and coffee berry disease also find it.
Nor is the cup a foregone conclusion in either direction. Paired blind CuppingTasting coffee to a set protocol: ground, steeped, the crust broken and the cup slurped from a spoon, so lots can be scored on the same table.More → of Caturra against Castillo found no significant difference in score. The profiles differ; the quality does not, and a lot stands or falls on ground, picking and mill rather than on which of the two names is printed.
4 Caturra prize lots: NZ$44 to NZ$76 a kilo.
- Caturra
- Other varieties
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.