There are many types of coffee plants that have been created through selective breeding or natural selection. These plants have many different characteristics that make them unique. Some plants are more resistant to disease and produce more fruit than others. These characteristics make some plants more commercially important than others.
Breed selection is an important factor in determining the success of a crop. The unique traits of each breed are taken into account by producers when making their choice. This, along with other factors, contributes to the overall quality of the finished product.
Terminology
There is considerable confusion as to which term to use when speaking about coffee subspecies. For the sake of clarity, within this article the terms will be used in accordance with loose guidelines put forth by the Specialty Coffee Association of America:
Variety
A variety differs from the species in some way, but retains most of the species’ characteristics.
Cultivar
Horticultural or agricultural varieties that are not found in nature, typically cultivated. Many varieties of specialty coffee are cultivars, such as Bourbon and Typica.
Selection criteria
-Farmers have designed standards for crops they would cultivate -Recent advances in breeding techniques have provided farmers with higher-yielding breeds with better disease resistance and better cup quality -All of these traits are critical to the success of a producer -Some traits producers may use to select breeds for crop development are mentioned below
The most important aspect of cup quality is how well the seed or fruit itself tastes.
The yield is how much fruit a certain type of plant produces. It’s typically shown in kilograms or tons per hectare per year. Farmers strive to get a high yield because it’s much more efficient. Recently, there’s been a trend of breeding plants specifically to get a higher yield.
The ability to resist diseases has become an important factor in not only natural selection but also in breeding new cultivars. Breeding for disease resistance has been mainly restricted to CLR and coffee berry disease (CBD) but also includes other diseases that are specific to a particular location.
resistance to pests is not a trait that is developed through breeding, but is rather a trait that is selected from different breeds. certain breeds of coffee, like robusta, have been found to be more resistant to pests and diseases than others, like arabica.
Smaller coffee plants are better for those who want to grow them indoors, or for growers who want plants that use less space and produce more coffee.
The level of caffeine is important to many people as it can have a stimulating effect but too much can be harmful.
A plant that matures early is desired because it will start producing fruit sooner.
Traditional varieties
Ethiopia’s landraces and cultivars
There are still some “heirloom” varieties of plants that areWidely grown, but the term “landrace” is becoming more popular to describe these plants. Ethiopia has a lot of agronomy research.
The term “heirloom” is often used to describe this type of coffee, but this does not give credit to the hard work and variety that goes into it. Many of the “heirloom varieties” are actually hybrids or selected cultivars. There is a lot of documentation on these, and they have recently been put into a publicly accessible format.
Sudan Rume
This coffee bean is from a local landrace in South Sudan’s Boma Plateau, which is home to one of the few remaining indigenous arabica coffee forests. The Sudan Rume plant is known for producing high-quality coffee beans, and is also moderately resistant to disease. Batian, Castillo, Centroamericano, and Ruiru 11 are all hybrids that include Sudan Rume in their lineage.
Yemen’s Landraces
Although Yemen does have a Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation, it has not been focusing its efforts on coffee cultivar breeding. Therefore, most of the coffees grown in Yemen are considered landraces that were selected from Ethiopia at some point during unrecorded history and then evolved on the Arabian peninsula independently.
Though both Typica and Bourbon coffee trees have their origins in Yemen, most Yemeni coffee farmers don’t use these names for the local landraces. The landraces are usually named after the regions where they are grown, such as Udain and Bura’a.
Typica
The first commercial variety of Arabica coffee to leave the Arabian Peninsula, Typica, originated from an unknown landrace in Yemen. It is believed that this landrace arrived in Yemen from Ethiopia sometime in the middle of the 15th century.
A type of coffee plant called Typica was taken to India, either by the Indian Sufi pilgrim Baba Budan or by the Dutch merchant Pieter van der Broeke. Around 1616, van der Broeke took a tree from Mokha and brought it to Amsterdam’s botanical garden.
The Typica coffee tree is cone-shaped with narrow leaves and long, narrow berries and seeds. Some growers consider Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee to be a distinct variety, but it is genetically identical to Typica. In Mexico, Typica is often called Pluma Hidalgo.
Bourbon
Bourbon is the second most popular coffee bean in the world, after Typica. It is native to Yemen, but was taken to the island of Bourbon (now La Réunion) by the French. Bourbon coffee beans are prized for their rich flavor.
The Standard red fruit Bourbon trees originally from America made progress and replaced the original Typica fields in many places. The French Spiritan Missionaries took the trees with them to Tanzania’s island of Zanzibar and central coast town of Bagamoyo in 1868. From these places, Bourbon trees would spread throughout East Africa, evolving into numerous local iterations and selections.
Bourbon coffee trees have a rounder, shubbier appearance than Typica trees. Their leaves are broader, and they produce more spherical fruits and less ovoid seeds.
Species
C. arabica
The best-known is Bourbon, which is also the main type of coffee grown in Brazil. However, Brazil is the country of origin for only about one-third of the world’s coffee. Arabica coffee comprises approximately 61 percent of the world’s coffee production from 2004-2010, as stated by The International Trade Centre. However, this percentage would be higher if Arabica coffee wasn’t as susceptible to diseases. There are many different varieties of Arabica coffee, each with unique characteristics. The best-known variety is Bourbon, which is also the main type of coffee grown in Brazil. It’s important to note that Brazil is the country of origin for only about one-third of the world’s coffee.
C. canephora (syn. C. robusta )
Vietnam produces the majority of the world’s Robusta coffee beans, with 97% of the country’s output consisting of Robusta beans.
There are three types of beans that are not considered separate varieties, but are instead considered to be unusual and very expensive. These beans are the Indonesian kopi luwak, the Philippine Kapéng Alamid, and the Kahawa Kubing. These beans are collected from the droppings of the common palm civet, which gives them a distinctive flavor due to the digestive processes that the civet goes through.
Since the 1860s, the Philippines has produced a notable Robusta variety coffee called Kahawa S?g, also known as “Sulu coffee”. It comes from the Sulu archipelago.
Other species
There are many other types of coffee besides Arabica and Robusta. One example is Kapeng barako, which is a Liberica variety grown in the Philippines. It was introduced during the time of Spanish colonization, and the Philippines became one of the leading producers of coffee in the early 1800s.
Production was cut short, however, due to “coffee rust” infestation. Scientists from Kew Gardens rediscovered Coffea stenophylla in Sierra Leone. Stenophylla had not been seen in the wild since 1954, but in December 2018 Professor Jeremy Haggar, of the University of Greenwich, and Dr Aaron Davis of Kew Gardens travelled to the forests of Sierra Leone to seek it out. Stenophylla can grow at higher temperatures than Arabica and has a better flavor profile than Robusta.
Selections
Gesha
The Gesha coffee bean originates from close to the town of Gesha in western Ethiopia.
The seeds were brought to the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center (CATIE) in Costa Rica in 1953. The reason for this was because the researchers targeted the selection for its resistance to coffee leaf rust. However, CATIE’s elevation is quite low, around 600 meters above sea level, and planting there was largely abandoned due to low productivity and poor quality.
Gesha coffee beans come from a variety of different trees, many of which are located near the center of where wild arabica coffee originates. This explains why not all Gesha trees are exactly the same.
Kent
In 1911, one of coffee’s earliest known rust-resistant selections was made on Doddengooda Estate in Mysore, India, from a single Typica tree that showed an ability to withstand the fungus.
The text is saying that, although Kent was once a good wheat for dealing with rust, it is no longer, because rust has evolved and become more virulent.
Java
Java is a coffee that is derived from one or more Ethiopian landraces. Some early Ethiopian versions of the coffee made it to Java in the 19th century, but it is believed that the version of Java that is known today was selected from a few mother trees in Ethiopia by Dutch coffee researcher P.J.S. Cramer in 1928.
He sent seeds to Java and the plants flourished. The plants showed resistance to leaf rust and other arabica varieties had faltered. The cultivar is referred to as Abyssinia in Indonesia. This is the name of Ethiopia at the time.
SL14, SL28, SL34
Scott Agricultural Laboratories were established in the 1930s in a building that used to be a sanatorium and hospital in Kikuyu, a town that is a stop along the Mombasa railway northwest of Nairobi.
The Scott Agricultural Facility was named after Dr. Henry Scott of the Church of Scotland Mission in 1913. In 1922, it became an agricultural facility after a prominent agricultural supervisor relocated from Kabete and transferred resources from Nairobi.
The coffee variety SL28 was selected and released in 1931 from a bronze-tip Tanganyika variety that is resistant to drought. This selection was made by A.D. Trench, who was the Senior Coffee Officer in the Kenya colony at the time. He also released his own Kenya Selected varieties in the 1920s.
The SL28 coffee plant was not as high-yielding or disease-resistant as intended, but it did produce coffee beans with a superior flavor, explaining its continued popularity.
The SL34 is a Kenyan selection of the Bourbon tree, which was observed in Kabete in a field labelled as French Mission. It is more productive than SL28 and better suited for planting in lower elevations.
Hybrids
The Timor Hybrid
The fact that Arabica and Robusta coffee beans are able to successfully mate and produce offspring is very unusual. This is because Arabica coffee beans have four sets of chromosomes, while Robusta coffee beans have only two sets. Robusta coffee beans are considered to be one of the parents of Arabica coffee beans, with the other parent being C. eugenioides. Therefore, this hybridization can be thought of as a backcross that has taken place over the course of 100,000 years.
“Tim Tim” and “Hibrido de Timor” are both names for the Timor Hybrid, a type of coffee that became popular in the early 20th century.
Mundo Novo
Bourbon was first introduced to Brazil and eventually bred with Typica to create a hybrid. This hybrid was first observed in 1943 in Sao Paulo state. Two selections have been made for distribution, the most recent in 1977. The resulting tree is tall and fruitful, but is mostly found in South America.
Catuaí
This coffee bean is a mix of Mundo Novo and Yellow Caturra that originated in Brazil. It was created in the 1940s, but wasn’t available to the public until the 1970s. It’s shorter than most coffee trees because of its Caturra heritage, and it’s also able to withstand strong winds. This type of coffee tree is productive, but it needs more fertilizer than other types of trees.
Pacamara
Pacamara is a Salvadoran cultivar that was released in the 1970s. It was worked on for more than 30 years prior to that at the Genetic Department of the Salvadoran Institute for Coffee Research (ISIC).
The quality report advised that this coffee should be processed as a natural in order to get the best results. Pacamara is a hybrid of the dwarf Bourbon Pacas and the giant Typica Maragogipe. It has the large leaf and bean size of Maragogipe.
Benguet
The Typica variety of coffee was originally grown in Benguet, which is located in the Cordillera highlands of the northern Philippines. It has been grown there since 1875.
Blue Mountains
A coffee berry disease-resistant mutation of Typica coffee.
Jember
Jember, also known as S795 and Linie S, is a widely used cultivar in Indonesia. It was developed in India from two resistant parents, Kent and S228, and is a disease resistant hybrid.