Typica reached the Americas through a small chain of plants moved from Yemen to India, then Java, Amsterdam and onward. Much of the continent's coffee descends from that passage.
Old Colombian trees appear rarely. When they do, the house treats age as a fact to record, not a reason to waive the table.
The passage, corrected
The chain is usually told as Yemen to Java. It did not happen that way. A direct attempt was planted in 1690 and the trees were dead by 1699. The line that survived went from Yemen to the Malabar coast of India first, and reached Java from there in shipments of 1696 and 1699, the earlier one lost to flood.
From Java one plant went to Amsterdam in 1706, and a descendant to Paris in 1714 after the Treaty of Utrecht. Almost all the coffee of the Americas came through that eye of the needle, which is why the genetic base is so narrow: markers that separate wild Ethiopian accessions find barely any variation at all among the cultivated types.
The story worth handling carefully
Gabriel de Clieu is said to have carried a seedling to Martinique, sharing his water ration with it through a becalmed and pirate-harried crossing. The date is unsettled, most likely 1723 and sometimes given as 1720.
The account has one source: de Clieu himself, published in 1774, more than fifty years after the voyage and in the year he died. Nothing corroborates the heroics, and he was not first regardless. Coffee was already growing in Saint-Domingue from 1715 and in Dutch Surinam from 1718. It is a good story and the house tells it as one.
One Typica prize lot: NZ$48 a kilo.
- Typica
- 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.