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# What Is Bourbon Coffee? The Variety Behind the Name
- URL: https://thecoffeecraft.com/what-is-bourbon-coffee/
- Published: 2026-10-26T16:06:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-31T16:07:30.000Z
- Description: The words "bourbon coffee" have two meanings, and only one of them has anything to do with whiskey. The other, and the subject of this article, is Bourbon, a variety of the arabica coffee plant that takes its name from Bourbon Island, today La Réunion in the Indian Ocean.
- Author: Professor Arabica
- Tags: Coffee Knowledge

The words "bourbon coffee" have two meanings, and only one of them has anything to do with whiskey. The other, and the subject of this article, is Bourbon, a variety of the arabica coffee plant that takes its name from Bourbon Island, today La Réunion in the Indian Ocean.

World Coffee Research (WCR), the agricultural research organization whose online variety catalog we rely on throughout this article, groups Bourbon with Typica, the other historic line of arabica. Bourbon's story is usually told in a single line: Yemen to Réunion, 1715\. The sources behind that line agree on the broad outline and disagree on almost every detail, which makes it a good case study in how coffee history gets written.

## Bourbon coffee in a whiskey barrel: the other meaning

Before we turn to the plant, a word on the drink. Some roasters age green coffee beans in used whiskey or bourbon barrels and then roast them, selling the result as barrel-aged coffee. Writing in Punch in 2016, Spike Carter described the end of the process: once aged, "the beans are dumped, roasted and bagged for limited release". The Daily Meal reported in 2013 that the beans age for roughly three weeks, long enough for them to absorb the moisture left in the wood. Punch gives no fixed aging time, and none of the sources we consulted says whether any alcohol remains in the finished coffee.

That is a roasting technique, not a type of coffee tree. Everything below concerns Bourbon the variety.

## How Bourbon Island gave the variety its name

### Coffee on Réunion before 1715

Réunion was not a blank slate. In his chapter on the island's coffee economy for Cambridge University Press, the historian Gwyn Campbell reports that wild coffee, known as Mauritiana, was found near Saint-Paul in 1711, growing above 600 m (about 2,000 ft). Philippe Haudrère, writing for the Portail de l'esclavage à La Réunion, quotes a proposal from that same year that mentions "wild coffee plants that I have found growing on the flat mountain areas behind Saint-Paul." Many popular accounts of Bourbon skip this wild coffee, yet it shows that the island already had coffee of its own before the famous shipment arrived.

### The 1715 shipment

The cultivated arabica that would become Bourbon arrived in the early 18th century under the French East India Company. William H. Ukers, in [*All About Coffee*](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/28500/28500-h/28500-h.htm?ref=thecoffeecraft.com) (1922), gives a range rather than a single year: "In 1715–17 the French Company of the Indies introduced the cultivation of the plant into the Isle of Bourbon (now Réunion)". Haudrère is more precise. He writes that "another ship loaded 60 coffee plants at Moka (Mauritius), sailing with them to Bourbon in September 1715."

How many of those 60 plants survived the voyage is a different matter. Figures of twenty, six or seven, or even two surviving plants circulate widely, but we could not trace any of them to a source we were able to read, so we leave them out.

The plantation that followed was built on enslaved labor. The French Ministry of Culture's archaeology site for the Indian Ocean notes that from 1715 the Company encouraged the islanders to develop a plantation economy based on slave labor. Ukers adds that "nine years later the island began to export coffee", a detail we found in his book alone.

### Who carried it, and from where?

Here the sources part ways.

- **Who.** Ukers credits the French Company of the Indies and names a ship's captain from Saint-Malo, Dufougeret-Grenier. Haudrère also describes a Company ship. WCR says instead that "French missionaries introduced Bourbon from Yemen to Bourbon Island (now La Réunion)". Perfect Daily Grind, in a 2022 article, speaks of French colonists. The two historical accounts point to the Company; the other versions should be read with that in mind.
- **From where.** WCR and Breville say the plants came from Yemen, and Perfect Daily Grind names Mocha. Mocha (al-Mukha) was Yemen's chief, or main, coffee-export port; other routes also carried coffee (Jidda in the 1842 Britannica, Hodeida later), as we explain in [our history of the port of Mocha](https://thecoffeecraft.com/mocha-port-yemen-coffee-trade/). Yet Coffee Review traces the Réunion tree along a much longer road: from Ethiopia to Mocha, then to Java, to a hothouse in Holland and on to Paris, before shoots reached the island. And Haudrère's English page glosses "Moka" as Mauritius, which adds a further question mark.

The fairest summary is this: the usual account says the plants came from Yemen, probably through Mocha, but the route is disputed. For the earlier chapter of the story, see [where coffee first came from](https://thecoffeecraft.com/where-coffee-originated/).

### The end of the coffee era on Réunion

Coffee did not last as the island's main crop. The French Ministry of Culture puts it plainly: "The “coffee” period was succeeded, after 1810, by the sugar era." Campbell describes production that "declined rapidly" after the 18th century. The variety, however, was about to travel.

## From Réunion to Brazil and East Africa

According to WCR, the variety stayed on its island for well over a century: "Until the mid-19th century, Bourbon did not leave the island." We found this statement on WCR's page only.

### Brazil, around 1860

WCR writes that "The Bourbon variety was introduced to Brazil around 1860". Daily Coffee News, in a 2019 history of Yellow Bourbon, describes a Brazilian envoy who traveled to Réunion in the 1850s. It reports that "By the 1870s, Red Bourbon had become a prominent coffee variety throughout many of the Brazilian coffeelands." A more precise year, 1859, appears in some accounts, but we could not open the Brazilian research document it is said to come from, so we keep to "around 1860". Coffee Review goes further and notes that Brazil's Santos coffees "are said to be offspring of the Bourbon tree", a claim we found in that one source.

WCR says Bourbon spread through South and Central America and has since largely been replaced by its own descendants, although WCR lists El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Peru as countries where Bourbon itself is still grown.

### East Africa: two dates, two routes

How Bourbon-type coffee reached East Africa is genuinely unsettled. Ukers wrote that "it was not until 1901 that coffee cultivation was introduced into British East Africa from Réunion." Coffee Review gives another date and another origin: "we have to wait until 1893, when coffee seed from Brazil was introduced into Kenya". Neither Ukers nor Coffee Review names the variety: both speak of coffee in general. Only Perfect Daily Grind, in a 2020 guide to the variety, speaks of Bourbon itself, crediting French missionaries with bringing it to the region in the 19th century. We see no way to choose between these accounts on the evidence we have, so we leave the question open.

## The Bourbon family tree

Several varieties that specialty drinkers meet on coffee labels are, according to WCR, mutations or crosses of Bourbon. WCR places Bourbon in what it calls the "Bourbon-Typica group (Bourbon related)". WCR says Typica was taken to Yemen in the 15th or 16th century, and Typica deserves a profile of its own. Here are the main relatives on Bourbon's side, as WCR describes them.

| Variety      | Relationship to Bourbon (WCR)            | Where and when (WCR)                                      |
| ------------ | ---------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------- |
| Caturra      | Natural mutation of Bourbon              | Minas Gerais, Brazil, between 1915 and 1918               |
| Pacas        | Natural mutation of Bourbon              | Pacas family farm, Santa Ana, El Salvador, 1949           |
| Villa Sarchi | Natural mutation of a Bourbon population | Northwestern Costa Rica, 1950s or 1960s                   |
| Mundo Novo   | Natural cross of Bourbon and Typica      | São Paulo state, Brazil, 1943                             |
| SL28         | Related to the Bourbon genetic group     | Kenya, selected in 1935 from Tanganyika Drought Resistant |

Caturra, a Bourbon mutation discovered in Brazil, is the one variety in the table that a second source confirms: Breville gives the same parentage and the same country, while the place and the dates come from WCR alone. For SL28, the link is recent: WCR states that "Recent genetic tests have confirmed that SL28 is related to the Bourbon genetic group." The other dates in the table also rest on WCR's catalog alone.

### Red, Yellow and Pink: colors are not genetics

Several Bourbons carry a color in their name, and the colors can mislead.

**Red Bourbon** is the form Daily Coffee News describes spreading across Brazil by the 1870s.

**Yellow Bourbon** appeared in Brazil around 1930, on a Red Bourbon farm near Pederneiras in São Paulo state, according to Daily Coffee News. Its origin is debated. Many believe it came from a natural cross between Red Bourbon and Yellow Botucatu, itself a mutation of Typica, while, in the article's words, "some researchers believe that Yellow Bourbon originated as a natural Red Bourbon mutation."

**Pink Bourbon** is the most surprising case. Cafe Imports, a green coffee importer, ran its own genetic tests (with DNA Analytica in 2017 and RD2 Vision in 2023) and concluded that Pink Bourbon "has nothing to do with Bourbon, as it is an Ethiopian landrace". Sprudge reported these results, but it did not run tests of its own, and the work comes from a single company. Treat it as a finding rather than settled science. It is still a useful lesson: a variety's name is a trade label, and only genetics tells you its family.

### Bourbon Pointu, or Laurina

Réunion kept one descendant of its own. Bourbon Pointu, also called Laurina, is described by Perfect Daily Grind in these terms: "The coffee plant is a dwarf mutation of the Bourbon variety". The magazine relies on a 2009 paper by Lecolier and colleagues in *Euphytica*; the research institute IRD's record of that paper notes that the origin of Bourbon Pointu was long debated. Perfect Daily Grind also says Laurina has "around half the caffeine content of other arabica varieties". We found no second source for that figure, so read it as a claim to be checked, not a measured fact.

## Bourbon on the farm and in the cup

Why would farmers replace a variety with such a history? WCR sums up Bourbon in one sentence: "a tall variety characterized by relatively low production, susceptibility to the major diseases, and excellent cup quality." Every part of that sentence matters on a farm.

- **Tall trees.** Breville agrees that Bourbon is a tall plant.
- **Modest yields.** Bourbon produces more than Typica, which WCR rates as a variety of "very low production"; Breville calls Bourbon's yields "slightly better than Typica." Still, by modern standards its output is low.
- **Disease.** WCR lists susceptibility to the major coffee diseases, and a producer quoted by Perfect Daily Grind calls Bourbon "a disease susceptible variety".
- **Patience.** WCR lists Bourbon's year of first production, the year the tree bears its first fruit, as Year 4\. The page does not say what that year counts from.
- **Altitude.** WCR rates Bourbon's optimal altitude, the altitude at which quality and agronomic potential peak, as High. The page gives no altitude in meters for Bourbon itself, and the meaning of High depends on latitude:  
  - above 1,600 m (about 5,200 ft) near the equator, between 5° north and 5° south;
  - above 1,300 m (about 4,300 ft) between 5° and 15° north or south;
  - above 1,000 m (about 3,300 ft) beyond 15° north or south.

The reward is in the cup. WCR speaks of "excellent cup quality", and Breville notes that Bourbon "produces smaller cherries which have a sweet and complex flavor." That cup is why Bourbon's name still appears on specialty labels, even though, as WCR notes, many farms in Latin America have replaced it with its descendants.

## What the label tells you

When a bag says "Bourbon", it names a lineage that runs back to a shipment of coffee plants sent to an Indian Ocean island in the early 18th century, by a route historians still argue over. The variety alone does not promise a flavor. But it does tell you that you are drinking from one of the old arabica lines: World Coffee Research identifies Bourbon as the parent of Caturra and Pacas.

To see how Bourbon fits among the other varieties, browse [our coffee knowledge articles](https://thecoffeecraft.com/tag/coffee-knowledge/). And to taste the sweetness the variety is known for, try a Bourbon lot in [a French press](https://thecoffeecraft.com/how-to-use-french-press/).