"cultivars" news and stories

Wine labels on coffee bags. Photo: biskuit, Flickr.

Erin Meister trains baristas for North Carolina-based Counter Culture Coffee and sporadically maintains the blog Meet the Press Pot from her home in New York City. This is part of a series for the caffeine-addicted.

As oenophiles know, variety is everything.

OK, not everything, but definitely something. And the same goes for coffee.

Much as wine grapes come in different cultivars (as anyone who prefers a Cabernet Franc to a Cabernet Sauvignon can tell you), coffee can be born to one of thousands of types, both heirloom and hybrid, which can have an impact on a coffee's productivity, appearance and, certainly, flavor.

While much is made of the variety of a particular grape (or apple, for fruit fans; or rose, for gardeners; or rice, for starch lovers), a large percentage of coffee farmers don't grow any one single type on their land, and many can't even be sure how much of their farm is one variety or another. Largely for this reason, any coffee that can be identified, with certainty, by its type is often cause for celebration among bean heads. The famous Esmeralda coffee I mentioned last week, for instance, is special in part because it comprises an exotic, transplanted Ethiopian variety called Gesha or Geisha (likely named for a spot in Ethiopia -- many African coffee varieties are christened for their proximity to certain villages or regions, such as Harrar and Sidamo).

Read more about coffee varieties after the jump.