Coffee Varietals & How One Farmer Blew My Mind

What Coffee Varietals Actually Are

(And Why the Farmer Might Matter More)

When the coffee industry talks about varietals, there is a lot of nodding along. And honestly, most everyday coffee drinkers cannot make the connection between a varietal name on a bag and what ends up in their cup. That is not on the coffee drinker. That is on us. The industry has done a poor job of bridging that gap, and it is past time we did better.

I was reminded of this recently when one of my favourite producers, Marleyi Córdoba from Huila, Colombia, made a decision that turned into one of the most interesting roasting experiments I have had in a while.

The Coffee Industry Looks Simple On the Outside.

Walk into your local café, order a cup, and you are out the door in minutes for a few dollars. Easy. But that cup represents roughly a year of growing, harvesting, processing, and shipping, plus years of farming expertise layered underneath all of it. The simplicity on the surface is masking a complex web of an industry that is working behind the scenes 24/7.

Varietals are one of the most misunderstood parts of that chain.

So, What Exactly Is a Coffee Varietal?

A coffee varietal is a subdivision of a coffee species. Most specialty coffee falls under Coffea arabica, but within arabica, there are hundreds of distinct varieties. Think of it the way you think about apples. A Granny Smith and a Honeycrisp are both apples, but they taste completely different and grow under different conditions.

Common arabica varietals you may have seen on bags include bourbon, typica, geisha, SL28, pacamara, and now increasingly, pink bourbon.

Many of these varietals originated from heirloom varieties in Ethiopia and Yemen and were transplanted to other parts of the world over centuries. When an Ethiopian heirloom was replanted in Panama, it mutated naturally over time into what we now call the Geisha variety, one of the most sought-after and expensive coffees in the world. When another Ethiopian heirloom landed in South and Central America, a similar process produced what we call pink bourbon, which despite the name, is not actually part of the bourbon family at all.

Varietals matter because they affect yield, disease resistance, altitude suitability, and yes, flavour.

The Experiment That Changed How I Think About Varietals

Marleyi Cordoba grows her coffee at a high altitude in Colombia. If I had to describe her in one word, it would be risk-taker. If I had more words, I would add badass, trailblazer, and beyond talented.

Over the last few years, Marleyi made the decision to cultivate a new varietal, the pink bourbon, and slowly phase out the tabi. Tabi is a beautiful coffee. What we had previously from Marleyi was a gorgeous tabi, but it is also a delicate and high-maintenance variety. The pink bourbon made more sense for her altitude and her goals. A calculated risk, but a bold one.

This year, I decided to run an experiment. I sourced the new pink bourbon from Marleyi and roasted it alongside what I remembered from her tabi. Almost every variable was identical: same soil, same altitude, same farmer, same farming practices. The only things that changed were the varietal and the crop year.

My hypothesis was that the pink bourbon would roast and taste noticeably different. Same farm, different plant. Like swapping green apples for red ones.

But actually, I was wrong.

The pink bourbon roasted almost identically to the tabi. And when I cupped it? Chocolatey, nutty, deeply sweet, with a flavour profile that tracked pretty close to last year's coffee. (If you haven't tried it yet, you're missing out. It tastes like a chocolate bar in your cup.)

The result had me scratching my head. I sat with it for a few days, sampled the coffee again and tried forming some cohesive notes.

Nature vs. Nurture in the Coffee World

Here is what I think happened, and it has shifted how I look at varietals entirely.

The soil was the same. The altitude was the same. The care and precision were the same. Marleyi brought the same rigour to a completely different plant and produced a remarkably similar result.

That is the mark of sheer talent.

It reopens the age-old debate of nature versus nurture, and my conclusion, still forming, is that nurture plays a much larger role than we give it credit for. We spend a lot of time in the specialty coffee world ranking varietals, chasing geisha lots, and treating certain varieties as inherently superior. But Marleyi's farm is making me question that hierarchy.

Coffee varietals are also fragile. They are affected by climate and altitude, and they are highly susceptible to coffee leaf rust, a fungal disease that can devastate an entire harvest and be financially catastrophic for a farming family (if you've ever owned a fiddle leaf fig house plant, you'll know exactly what leaf rust is). A lot of the varietals in use today were developed through carefully commissioned lab programs designed to create more resilient plants. Nestlé (of Nespresso fame) and Starbucks have each developed proprietary varietals through similar processes. The sidra variety, for instance, is widely believed to have roots in Nestlé lab testing.

For a deeper look at what varietals are out there, the World Coffee Research database and the Café Imports variety catalogue are both excellent starting points. Neither list is comprehensive, which tells you everything about how vast and evolving this space is.

What This Means for the Coffee in Your Cup

Varietal selection matters. It affects what a farmer can grow at a given altitude, how resistant the crop is to disease, and to some extent, what ends up in your cup.

But maybe the more important variable is the farmer.

What if instead of chasing varietal names, we trusted that a skilled farmer could take a solid plant, cultivate it with precision, and produce something exceptional? And then charge a premium for it because of their craft, not the variety's reputation?

In my opinion, that is exactly what a great return on investment looks like. And Marleyi Córdoba is proof of that.