Pink Bourbon Coffee

Pink Bourbon’s own name is the first thing about it that turns out to be wrong. In November 2014, a Cafe Imports green coffee buyer known in the company’s own telling only as “Lucho” tracked down a Colombian farm growing an unusual tree with cherries that ripened to a salmon-pink color instead of the usual red or yellow. (Sprudge later named him: Luis Arocha, Senior Green Coffee Buyer with Cafe Imports, a detail Cafe Imports itself chose to leave out because “the story is more fun without that tidbit.”) Since it grew among ordinary Bourbon plants and Bourbon is the variety already known to throw red and yellow color mutations, the local producer’s own theory, and the one the trade adopted along with the name, was that it must be a spontaneous cross of Red and Yellow Bourbon.

The genetics tell a different story, and it took most of a decade to sort out. A first DNA test in 2017, run by DNA Analytica on leaf tissue from two differently shaped Pink Bourbon plants, came back closer to wild Ethiopian coffee than to Bourbon, but the match sat in an inconclusive low-80-percent range. A second round in 2023, run by researcher Christophe Montagnon at RD2 Vision on five samples from separate Colombian and Costa Rican farms, closed the case: every sample carried Pink Bourbon genetics unrelated to true Bourbon, an Ethiopian landrace that somehow reached South America and was noticed for the first time only in the 2010s. How an Ethiopian plant ended up growing in a Colombian Bourbon field is still unexplained. One standing guess is that it arrived as an accidental substitute for Gesha, another Ethiopian landrace that made the same journey decades earlier and became famous for exactly the same reason: it does not taste like the coffee growing around it.

That distinctiveness is what has kept the misleading name in circulation. Wilton Benitez’s Pink Bourbon, grown in Piendamo, Cauca and put through a double-anaerobic ferment with ozone and UV sterilization, scored 98 points from Coffee Review in July 2023 on blackberry jam, honeysuckle, and dried pineapple, enough to make it the outlet’s No. 1 coffee of that year. Washed lots score lower but still well above average: Paradise Roasters’ 2019 Huila lot and Big Shoulders’ 2021 El Paraiso microlot both landed at 94, with honeysuckle, lychee, and sandalwood notes recurring across farms and years, a signature that survives the swing from simple washing to elaborate fermentation even if the ceiling clearly rises with it.

None of this made Pink Bourbon easy to grow. It wants a cool, high microclimate, generally above 1,700 meters, and Colombia’s Huila and Cauca departments remain its commercial center, on farms like Rodrigo Sanchez Valencia’s Finca Monteblanco and the smallholdings behind the JBC and Big Shoulders lots above. It is still sold variety-first rather than farm-first in a lot of marketing, but the roasters chasing the best cups now name the producer on the bag, the same shift in emphasis that Gesha went through once Panama’s growers proved the variety, not the place, was doing the work.