What Pink Bourbon actually is

Pink Bourbon is usually described as a hybridisation of Red and Yellow Bourbon. The colour sits in the cherry, not in the cup. The fruit ripens to a blush instead of to red or yellow, and the seed inside looks like any other green coffee.

It is rare because the colour is fragile. The recessive genes that produce pink and orange cherries are easily overwritten by red and yellow genes in a single grain of pollen, so a block of Pink Bourbon planted near other Bourbons drifts back towards red within a few generations. Keeping it pink means keeping it isolated and picking it separately. Producers who manage that also report it holds up reasonably well against rust, which is part of why it has spread through Huila.

The name is contested. Genetic work in recent years suggests these trees may not descend from Bourbon at all, but from an Ethiopian landrace that arrived in Colombia by another route. The trade kept the name it already had. We use it too, because it is the name the farm and the importer use, and changing it on the bag would make the lot harder to trace, not easier.

What stays consistent is the aromatic intensity. Pink Bourbon tends towards flowers, stone fruit and citrus, with an acidity that reads as juice rather than as sharpness. In this lot from Finca Villa Betulia it comes through as dried orange and sugar cane juice, with mellow dried blackberry, a floral finish and a winey acidity.

This is the reason we buy for the variety. Origin tells you where a coffee grew. Roast level tells you what the roaster did. The variety tells you what the plant was capable of before anyone touched it.