The three primary species of coffee. What are the original species of coffee beans?

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When we talk about Ethiopian coffee, some people use jasmine, rose fruit, magnolia and other words to describe the fragrance of flowers, but have you ever wondered why these specific varieties with floral flavor are often summed up as "native species"?

In the early days of the third wave of coffee, native species were often used to describe Ethiopian coffee, but this is not very accurate. Because people do not fully understand these varieties at all, many local producers are deprived of the opportunity to know more varieties and earn higher income, and bean bakers are unable to distinguish the differences between these varieties. Consumers also do not have the opportunity to taste new varieties and new flavors, because it is not clear what varieties to choose from.

But changing this situation is easy to say, but difficult to do. Let's take a closer look at the true meaning of native species and the difficulties encountered in improving the transparency of their information.

The true meaning of the original species

The word "native species" refers to the ancient varieties of plants that were originally planted to be eaten, while some people define a variety that takes more than 100 years to be called a native species, while others say 50 years. Then some people define varieties that existed before 1945 as native species, about the time when hybrids began to emerge, or 1951, when hybrids became more widespread.

In the coffee industry, you will find that the term native species applies to varieties introduced to South America and Asia more than 100 years ago, as well as to many coffee varieties in Africa, especially coffee from Ethiopia.

Getu Bekele, East Africa supply chain manager at Counter Culture Coffee in the United States, who works to build an index of Ethiopian coffee varieties, says that in Ethiopia, the emergence of the word native species occurred after the start of the boutique coffee movement. At that time, buyers of boutique coffee, which could not tell the difference between Tibica and bourbon, would collectively refer to all these unknown varieties as native species.

But Getu said Ethiopian coffee producers use different names to distinguish different coffee plants. instead of using globally recognized scientific names, they usually use local words and may borrow some characteristics of local coffee trees to refer to a variety of coffee trees.

Medina Hussein, export department manager at coffee exporter DW Coffee and a supplier of Ethiopian coffee, said boutique coffee buyers distinguish Ethiopian coffee by region, altitude and cup score, not by variety.

In a broad sense, Ethiopian coffee varieties can be divided into two categories: JARC varieties and regional local varieties.

The JARC variety is paired by the Jima Agricultural Research Center, an institution of the Ethiopian Agricultural Federal Research Center, which is mainly set up to study pest resistance and increase yield. There are about 40 varieties in it. Regional local varieties are wild varieties grown in the wild in Ethiopia. Getu says there may be more than 10, 000 of these wild species.

This means that when consumers buy a bag of Ethiopian coffee and see the bean bag marked with native species, the coffee may be a combination of more than 10,000 varieties.