01 — Why it matters

Why the cultivar is on the bag

A variety name is a flavour promise and a statement of intent at once. Two plants of different varieties, grown side by side on the same soil, picked the same afternoon and processed the same way, will taste distinctly — sometimes unrecognisably — different, because the plant’s own genetics shape the sugars and aromatics it is able to build. That is why a serious roaster prints the cultivar, and why it pays to learn to read it. These five, more than any others, are the ones doing the talking in specialty right now.

02 — The established

The two that built the category

Geisha (or Gesha)

The most famous variety in specialty, and the one that dragged the whole idea of “variety” onto the label. It was collected in the 1930s from a forest near the town of Gesha in south-west Ethiopia, carried through a Costa Rican research station, and then ignored for decades — low-yielding, leggy, a nuisance to grow. In 2004 the Peterson family entered a lot from their farm, Hacienda La Esmeralda, into the Best of Panama competition. It won, and sold for $21 a pound — a record at the time that made the room gasp. That single result created the modern exotic-coffee market. Two decades on, the ceiling has gone somewhere frankly absurd: a Panamanian Geisha took the 2025 Best of Panama auction at more than $13,000 a pound. At its best the cup explains a little of the madness — jasmine, bergamot, peach, white grape, an almost perfumed lift you can smell across a room. It is grown all over the map now, from Colombia to Guatemala, with wildly varying success; the variety is fussy about where it will truly sing.

SL28

Kenya’s signature, and proof that a single variety can carry a whole country’s flavour identity. It was bred in the 1930s at Scott Agricultural Laboratories outside Nairobi — the “SL” — selected for drought resistance and cup quality, and it has been the backbone of Kenyan coffee ever since, usually planted alongside its sister selection SL34. SL28 is responsible for the unmistakable Kenyan cup: blackcurrant, grapefruit, tomato, a fierce, structural acidity over a heavy, syrupy body. It does not taste like that anywhere else. Planted experimentally in Colombia and Honduras, the results are genuinely interesting — and not Kenyan, which tells you how much the ground matters even to a great variety.

03 — The new wave

The new wave

Pink Bourbon

A Colombian cultivar found in Huíla in the early 2000s and named for the pink blush of its ripe cherry — neither the yellow of a Yellow Bourbon nor the red of a Red. Genetically it sits somewhere between Bourbon and Typica, and its exact parentage is still being untangled in the lab. In the cup it is one of the most exciting things to appear in twenty years: stone fruit, tropical fruit, jasmine, sometimes lychee or papaya, a complex sweetness with a long tail. It is spreading fast through Colombia and into Central America, and it is worth going out of your way for.

Sidra

A newer name still, and a slightly mysterious one. Sidra was first identified in Ecuador, on a former Nestlé research plot planted with unlabelled Bourbon–Typica crosses — the genetics are still being formalised, with Red Bourbon × Typica the usual guess — but the cup behaviour is remarkably consistent: bright, citrus-forward, tea-like, with floral top notes and an intense sweetness. It is now grown widely in Colombia and Ecuador, and it is the variety most likely to ambush someone who thinks they already know what high-grown Colombian tastes like.

Wush Wush

An Ethiopian heritage variety named for a town in the Kaffa region. Like Geisha, it spent decades in obscurity before being carried to Latin America, and it is now grown by a handful of producers in Colombia — Huíla and Cauca especially — to steadily growing acclaim. The profile is frankly exotic: tropical fruit, peach, hibiscus, a heady floral character that invites comparison with Geisha but lands differently — less bergamot, more candy-shop sweetness. When it is good, it is unforgettable.

04 — On the label

Reading them on the label

When a bag bothers to name its cultivar, it is telling you where to point your attention. A Bourbon or a Caturra is the reliable workhorse — lovely, but the country and the processing will tell you most of what you need. A Geisha, an SL28, a Pink Bourbon, a Sidra or a Wush Wush is the producer asking you to pay attention to the variety itself, and usually to pay more for it. The cup will repay that attention — but only if the rest of the chain held up. A great variety is a great engine; the terroir, the processing and the roast are the rest of the car. A Geisha grown carelessly and roasted dark is just an expensive way to drink toast.