Variety record
Typica
The founding lineage of the Americas - low-yielding, rust-susceptible, and being replaced almost everywhere.
Commonly got wrong
The route from Yemen to India to Java to Amsterdam to the Americas is often told as a single-plant story. Genetic fingerprinting indicates the Yemen-to-India introduction included both Typica-like and Bourbon-like material, so the tidy version is tidier than the record.
Typica is the ancestor of most coffee grown in the Western Hemisphere, and it is disappearing from it.
The route, and how tidy it is not
The usual telling runs: Yemen to India in the 1600s, to Java under the Dutch in 1696, to Amsterdam in 1706, a single plant to Louis XIV in 1714, and from there to the Americas. It is a good story and the single-plant bottleneck is real enough to matter for arabica’s narrow genetic base.
Genetic fingerprinting has indicated that the Yemen-to-India introduction included both Typica-like and Bourbon-like material, which makes the clean single-lineage version of the story cleaner than the evidence.
Why it is being replaced
Typica yields poorly and has little resistance to leaf rust or coffee berry disease. For most producers those two facts together are decisive regardless of how the coffee cups. It survives where a premium justifies it – Jamaica Blue Mountain, parts of Peru and Central America – and is going elsewhere.
Qualifications on the record
- Parentage
- The founding cultivated arabica lineage in the Americas
- Typical cup
- Clean, sweet and transparent, with a malic acidity. Lets the origin speak, which is both the appeal and the limitation.
- What “Declared only” means here
- Nobody has tested it. This is the normal state of almost every coffee sold.
Origins where it is recorded
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Colombia
The origin whose published price is not in the unit, the state, or the currency most people assume - and whose grade names describe a hierarchy that does not exist.
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Guatemala
Eight named regions, an altitude ladder with seven rungs, and a naming system that is a framework rather than an appellation.
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Boquete, Panama
Where Gesha became the most expensive name in coffee in 2004 - and where the name and the genetics started to come apart.
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Sumatra, Indonesia
Where the famous flavour comes from the processing rather than the place - and where the famous name is not a place at all.