Variety record
Timor Hybrid
One spontaneous cross on one island, and the source of nearly all rust resistance in cultivated arabica.
Commonly got wrong
This is a SPECIES cross, not a variety cross, and that is the whole reason it matters. Nearly every rust-resistant arabica planted anywhere - Catimor, Sarchimor, Castillo, Lempira, Parainema, Ruiru 11 - traces its resistance to this one plant. The cup penalty attached to "Catimor" is a claim about robusta genes that many later generations have bred back out.
The Timor Hybrid is the most consequential plant in modern coffee and almost nobody drinks it.
A cross between two species
Arabica and robusta are different species with different chromosome counts, and they do not normally cross. On Timor a spontaneous hybrid appeared that did, and it carried robusta’s resistance to coffee leaf rust into a plant that was otherwise arabica enough to breed with arabica.
Everything downstream follows from that. Catimor is Timor Hybrid crossed with Caturra. Sarchimor is Timor Hybrid crossed with Villa Sarchi. Castillo, Colombia, Lempira, IHCAFE 90, Parainema, Ruiru 11, Obata and a long list of others carry material from this one cross.
The cup penalty, and what it actually refers to
“Catimors taste bad” is one of the most durable claims in specialty coffee. It originates in real experience with early generations, where robusta character came through with the resistance.
The claim is worth holding carefully now, for two reasons. Breeding programmes have spent decades selecting away from it, so a modern release is many generations from the original cross. And competition results include introgressed varieties scoring in the high eighties. The honest position is that introgression is a risk factor for cup quality rather than a verdict on any particular release.
Why a reference site records it at all
It is not sold, so it does not appear on bags. It appears in the parentage line of a large fraction of what is planted, which means a variety table that only records what is sold cannot explain why any of those varieties exist.
Qualifications on the record
- Parentage
- A spontaneous cross between Coffea arabica and Coffea canephora (robusta) found on Timor
- Typical cup
- Not usually sold on its own merits. Its significance is what it passes on.
- What “Declared only” means here
- Nobody has tested it. This is the normal state of almost every coffee sold.