What Does Arabica Mean for Ethiopian Heirloom Varieties?

Heirloom on an Ethiopian coffee bag is not a single variety but an umbrella term for the country's many native Arabica types. As the birthplace of coffee, Ethiopia holds thousands of natural variants, and producing areas often grow dozens of them mixed together, so classifying each one by hand is impractical.

Knowing what does arabica mean helps here: the arabica meaning covers the species that spread from Ethiopia to become Typica, Bourbon and Geisha, while local names such as JARC numbered lines, Geisha 1931, Gori Geisha and Wush Wush sit inside the Heirloom label. Uneven bean size in an Ethiopian lot usually signals mixed varieties, not poor quality.

When buying Ethiopian single-origin coffee, the "Heirloom" often seen on packaging can be puzzling. It is not a specific variety, but a general term for the vast number of native Arabica varieties in the region. As the birthplace of coffee, Ethiopia has thousands of natural variants, and many producing areas even grow dozens of varieties mixed together, making it impossible to classify them one by one. From Front Street's perspective, this article will help you understand the true meaning of Heirloom, its relationship with flavor, and the stories of specific varieties such as JARC numbered varieties, Geisha 1931, Gori Geisha, and Wush Wush.

When choosing single-origin coffee beans now, information such as origin, variety, and processing method is often the first thing we focus on. After all, the core pleasure of drinking single-origin coffee lies in experiencing the presentation of different flavors.

When selecting Ethiopian beans, the variety name "Heirloom" can be seen almost everywhere. What exactly is its origin? Today, Front Street will discuss it in detail.

"Heirloom" literally translates as heirloom, and in China it is also often called native species. It does not specifically refer to a single coffee variety, but is an umbrella term—in Ethiopia, any coffee that cannot be clearly classified by variety can be placed under the name "Heirloom."

This has to start with Ethiopia's special status. The Arabica coffee we love originated precisely in Ethiopia. Varieties commonly seen today, such as Typica, Bourbon, and Geisha, were all initially spread from Ethiopia. Within Ethiopia itself, there are still tens of thousands of natural coffee varieties.

In a coffee forest, it is completely normal for dozens of varieties with different forms to grow mixed together. Classifying and cataloging these varieties one by one by manpower is almost impossible and would also require a great deal of time and money. Therefore, as a country highly dependent on agricultural exports for foreign exchange earnings, Ethiopia uses its advantage as the birthplace of Arabica and uses the name "Heirloom" to cover all native varieties.

Therefore, if you see Ethiopian coffee beans of different sizes and with obvious differences in appearance, this does not mean the quality is poor. On the contrary, it shows that they include coffee beans from many different varieties, and uneven size is a normal phenomenon.

Since the variety cannot even be guaranteed, how can the flavor be guaranteed? There is actually a common misunderstanding here. When we usually say that variety affects flavor, we mainly mean non-Arabica species, or Arabica species carrying non-Arabica genes. If they are all pure Arabica species, the differences in flavor are actually not very large.

Another misunderstanding is about single-origin coffee. So far, single-origin coffee only refers to the geographical concept of a single producing area, and there is no such thing as "single variety." This is because the environment shapes the growth state of plants, which in turn forms regional flavor. Take Yirgacheffe as an example. It is also coffee whose varieties cannot be distinguished, but after becoming accustomed to the local geographical environment, it has formed unique flavor characteristics. Local people are also used to calling the coffee varieties in the Yirgacheffe region "Kurume."

Of course, in addition to using "Heirloom," Ethiopia is also conducting variety selection and research. For example, the "numbered" varieties such as 74110, 74112, and 74158 that have frequently appeared in green bean competitions in the past two years are actually varieties bred by the Jimma Agricultural Research Center, also called JARC varieties. Among these five digits, the first two represent the year the samples were collected for classification and selection, and the last three are the coffee number under that classification. For example, 74110 is variety number 110 selected in 1974.

Of course, well-known varieties such as Geisha and Typica can also be found in Ethiopia, since they originally came from here. However, note that Ethiopia's Geisha varieties are Geisha 1931 and Gori Geisha, which differ to some extent from Panama Geisha in terms of variety.

Geisha 1931 was confirmed by observing plant morphology, bean shape, size, and cupping performance, and is considered the variety closest to the mother stock of Panama Geisha. Gori Geisha, on the other hand, was collected in 2011 by the owner of Gesha Village in the wild coffee forest of Gori Geisha, and no duplicate samples have been found elsewhere so far.

There is also the Wush Wush variety, which has had a similar experience to Geisha. In the 1970s and 1980s, it was brought to the Cenicafe laboratory in Colombia for selection and breeding, then promoted for planting, and came to market in 2017, attracting attention for its unique flavor. Wush Wush was originally a village in the Kaffa forest. The local coffee had a distinctive flavor, so the Jimma Agricultural Research Center took samples and selected seeds there. The selected variety was named after the village, Wush Wush, and then promoted to farmers in the Kaffa region for planting. In 2017, Hugh Kelly won the Australian Barista Championship precisely with the Wush Wush variety from the Kaffa region.

The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.