Pink Bourbon.

What the genetics found

Two rounds of testing have looked at Pink Bourbon. In 2017 DNA Analytica, commissioned through Caravela, read leaf samples from two plants and returned about eighty per cent similarity to Ethiopian and wild Ethiopian material, alongside traits shared with Catimor, Bourbon and Tanzanian Mufindi. The result was inconclusive.

In 2023 RD2 Vision tested five samples for Cafe Imports. Christophe Montagnon put it plainly: the material contains Pink Bourbon, which has nothing to do with Bourbon, as it is an Ethiopian landrace. The older story of a spontaneous cross between Red and Yellow Bourbon does not survive the marker data.

One number in that panel matters more than the headline. Only one of the five samples was pure; the other four carried Bourbon or Catimor genetics alongside. So the honest claim is about the Pink Bourbon component, not about every tree sold under the name. Seed-lot purity in Colombia is genuinely variable, and the house does not claim otherwise for a lot it has not had tested.

In the field

The cherries ripen orange to salmon rather than pink, on elongated light-green leaves. Cherry shape varies across the population: some elongated and Gesha-like, some rounder. It is one of the reasons picking costs more. Ripeness is not signalled by red, so a picker has to read the fruit rather than glance at it.

Treat it as susceptible to rustLeaf 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 →. It is a landrace type with no bred-in resistance, and reports conflict: growers in Huila report little trouble, while Boram Um describes it as very susceptible to disease and fungus in Brazil. The house does not market it as resistant.

The name

Pink Bourbon is a misnomer that the trade has kept because the market knows it. Ian Fretheim at Cafe Imports has argued against renaming, putting it alongside strawberry and koala bear: names that describe nothing accurately and work anyway.

Boram Um took the 2023 World Barista Championship with a naturalNaturalDried in the whole cherry, never depulped, and hulled at the end. The slowest of the four to dry, and the one with the most that can go wrong on the bed.More → Pink Bourbon in his signature drink. That coffee came from the Um farm in Brazil, not from Colombia. The variety travels; the ground still decides the cup.