What Chiroso, Gesha and other variety names on a bag mean

Two bags can both say Gesha and still hold different plants. A variety name tells you which kind of coffee plant the beans came from, much as an apple name tells you the kind of tree. The names in this piece all belong to arabica, one species of coffee. World Coffee Research's history of arabica says the species is native to Ethiopia, where most of its genetic diversity is found. Farmers and breeders have since selected dozens of varieties from it. Some names have solid genetic records behind them, and some are closer to a local nickname.

The family a variety belongs to

World Coffee Research sorts arabica into a few broad groups, and knowing them makes most names easier to place. Ethiopian landraces are traditional varieties adapted over time to their local setting. Most come from the forests of Ethiopia, and WCR links them with very high cup quality and lower yields. You may also see the word heirloom used for this group, as Partners Coffee does.

The Bourbon and Typica group is the other big one, and it grew from very little. A small number of trees taken out of Yemen from the late 1600s form the basis of most arabica grown today. World Coffee Research gives a figure from Brazil, which grows 40% of the world's coffee. There, 97.55% of cultivars derive from Typica and Bourbon. A third group, called introgressed, carries genes from another species, mainly robusta. Those genes let the plants resist coffee leaf rust. Catimors and Sarchimors belong here.

Three familiar names show how the catalog works. Bourbon takes its name from Bourbon Island, now La Réunion, where French missionaries brought it from Yemen in the early 1700s. WCR describes a tall plant with fairly low production and excellent cup quality. Caturra is a natural mutation of Bourbon, found in Brazil between 1915 and 1918. One gene change makes the plant smaller, and its name comes from a Guarani word meaning small. Typica shows that names can multiply. WCR lists it as also called Criollo, Indio, Arábigo, Blue Mountain and Sumatra, among others.

Gesha, and why it has two spellings

Gesha has a well known story, and World Coffee Research's entry for it lays out the record. It was collected from Ethiopian coffee forests in the 1930s and sent to a research station in Tanzania. In 1953 it reached the CATIE center in Central America, where it was logged as T2722. It went out across Panama in the 1960s because it tolerated leaf rust, but farmers disliked its brittle branches and planted little of it. Then in 2005 the Peterson family entered it in the Best of Panama competition and auction. It earned very high marks and broke the record for green coffee auction prices at the time, selling for over $20 a pound.

The two spellings come from translation and record keeping, so neither one is a mistake. WCR says there is no set translation from the dialects of Ethiopia into English. The coffee was first written down as Geisha in plant records, and researchers mostly kept that spelling. Many in the industry prefer Gesha, because the collection site was near a mountain usually written that way.

The name also covers more than one plant, and this matters more than the spelling when you buy. WCR says there is significant confusion, because several genetically distinct plant types have been called Geisha. The term is often applied to coffees that lack the genetics of the Panamanian line. WCR's testing confirmed that Panamanian Geisha descended from T2722 is distinct and uniform. It links this line with floral, jasmine and peach-like aromas when the plants are managed well at high altitude. So a bag that says Gesha is making a claim, and how the plant was grown still counts.

Chiroso, a name still being sorted out

Chiroso has a far thinner paper trail, and an honest summary includes the gaps. It is commonly grown in Urrao, in the Colombian department of Antioquia. Perfect Daily Grind's reporting quotes Pedro Miguel Echavarría of Pergamino Coffee on the name. He says the word is rural Colombian slang for something slightly elongated, a nod to the long beans. The plants are short like Caturra, and growers took them for a mutation of it, calling them Caturra Chiroso.

Later testing pointed somewhere else, though the evidence is less settled than some bags suggest. The same article says some research institutions found Chiroso unrelated to the Bourbon and Typica group and linked it to Ethiopian landraces. It also notes that those studies have yet to be scientifically verified. Sey says the variety has been genetically identified as an Ethiopian landrace, but that it can't get more specific. Sey also says it still doesn't know how the variety came to be grown in Urrao. Partners Coffee puts it more cautiously, calling it more likely an Ethiopian heirloom.

Its reputation among buyers grew through competition in Colombia. The Alliance for Coffee Excellence results for Colombia South 2014 put Carmen Cecilia Montoya Patiño of Bella Vista, in Urrao, in first place with 91.31 points. Sey says she won with a then unknown variety called Chiroso, and that buyers had mostly been focused on other regions until then. Echavarría adds a caution in the Perfect Daily Grind piece. Some Chiroso lots taste spectacular, he says, and others are not so different from a standard Caturra.

When the name is wrong

Pink Bourbon gives the clearest warning about taking a name at face value. The importer Cafe Imports reports that it tested the coffee in 2017 with DNA Analytica and in 2023 with RD2 Vision. It says the coffee is an Ethiopian landrace, and not a Bourbon at all. Of five samples sent in the second round from Colombia and Costa Rica, the lab found one pure, two mixed with true Bourbon and two mixed with Catimor. This is one importer's account of its own tests. Still, it shows that a name can misdescribe a coffee, and that one lot can hold more than one plant type.

How to read the name on your bag

A variety name works best as one clue among several, and the rest of the bag helps you judge how far to trust it. Look for a named farm and region, since a specific source is easier to check than a bare word. See whether the roaster says how the variety was identified. If the name is in the World Coffee Research catalog, you can read its growth habit, lineage and history for free. For Gesha, the catalog rates quality potential at high altitude as exceptional. It sets the high altitude bar by latitude, from above 1,600 meters near the equator to above 1,000 meters far from it.