Those who have some history probably are aware that St. Helena, a tiny island located in the middle of the South Atlantic roughly between Brazil and Africa, is famous as the final exile place of Napoleon I (and also, in travel writing hype, as one “of the most remote places in the world.” ) A tiny island but mountainous, its coffee apparently was first made famous by that same Napoleon, whose claim that it was the best coffee he ever tasted made it briefly fashionable in France. After that it apparently dropped out of sight until revived in recent years.

It occasionally shows up billed as a contender for the world’s rarest coffee; alternatively the most expensive, etc. etc. Typically such story-driven novelty coffees are rather limp in the cup, blown away by any decent Yirgacheffe, for example, and the two samples of St. Helena I cupped in past years did not particularly impress. The sample we had of this past year’s crop, however, was quite engaging. Maybe my colleague Jason hit the roast just right (a slow, coaxy profile to whole-bean M-Basic 48, darkish medium), or maybe some years of careful cultivation are producing healthier cherry.

The sample was rich, floral- and wine-toned, juicy: night-blooming flowers, Concord grape, peach, with a clean, balanced structure, a little like a very good Rwanda, for example.

The beans were intriguing in appearance as well. They look a little like Ethiopia beans from regions like Yirgacheffe, smallish, definitively oval, with a deep crease that tends to retain silver skin. When I finally got myself away from the cupping table and went on line I discovered that the St. Helena variety is purported to be a pure strain imported from the Yemeni port of Mocha, originally brought to St. Helena by in 1733 by a Captain Philips of the East India Company, and currently named (at least according to material floating around the Internet) Green Tipped Bourbon. Certainly both the appearance of the beans and the profile I tasted support this history. These are maybe larger beans than one sees among the old varieties in Yemen, but they of course would have naturalized in a much more lush environment than found anywhere in Yemen. And the cup definitely has a quietly East-Africa character, in particular expressing the deeply floral and richly fruit-toned side of the Bourbon heritage.

What drove me to write about this coffee is the unusual confluence of history, exotic plant variety, exotic terroir and rare coffee hype that in this is actually supported by a distinctive and distinguished sensory profile. This spring we’ve reviewed several coffees from Ethiopia and Kenya that probably blow the St. Helena away in terms of pure sensory fireworks, but I think students of coffee will find well worth trying a sample of this quietly distinctive coffee if they can find one sensitively and freshly roasted.

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Mentioned are 3 varieties: Abbysinia, Rambung and USDA. The former two I have done plenty of research on but that is another story. The USDA one I have found most interesting as it is being grown by a number of farmers in Bali and likely other areas as well whereas the former I have yet to hear of any large group of farmers who is growing in Indonesia though I suspect they do exist.

I had scoured the internet for references to this varietal on several occasions in the past couple years. The name USDA 762 was mentioned several times in reference to an Ethiopian line introduced by Americans in the 1950’s or early 1960’s. But for a long time that was all the info I could find on this variety. Early 2011 I found another piece of info that held the key to unraveling the origins of this cultivar. I can’t remember the source anymore but I found out that 762 was a shortened form of a longer number – 230762. I had no idea what this number meant but searching that number and the right key words in Google Scholar led to a reference to it. A match was found in a paper published by the USDA July 1960 – ‘Coffee Germplasm Collection and Distribution’

I wasn’t able to read this paper online or order it but I called my friend Dr. Shawn Steiman of Coffea Consulting to see if he might be able to track down this paper for me. I had mostly forgotten about it the past couple months, but then Shawn was visiting the Big Island for the Ka’u Coffee Festival over the weekend and he told me he had the paper I had asked for. Most of the time when looking through loads of information in these papers I don’t find what I’m looking for. But this time I was lucky. A little more information and another clue into finding the exact origins of this variety.

Plant Introduction No: 230762

Name under which seeds or plants were Rec’d: C. arabica Lejeune’s #8 Line 108

Year Received: 1955

CRRC (Coffee Rust Research Center, now CIFC in Portugal) No: 536

Type Resistance (referring to rust): E and C

Finally knowing what the number 230762 was (the USDA plant Introduction #) it only took a couple of late nights searching through information to find out more about this introduction.

Plant Material Introduced January 1 to Dec 31 1955. USDA June 1964

230729 to 230780. COFFEA ARABICA L. Rubiaceae. Arabian coffee.

From Ethiopia. Seeds collected by Jean B. H. Lejeune, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Addis Ababa. Received Dec. 20, 1955.

Collected in the forest region of Kaffa Province, about 16 miles from Mizan Tafari.

October, 1955.

230759 to 230778. From Mizan Tafari. Elevation 4,700 feet.

230759. Line 0105. 230765. Line 0111.

230760. Line 0106. 230766. Line 0112.

230761. Population 0107. 230767. Line 0113.

230762. Line 0108. 230768. Line 0114.

From 1954 -1956 JBH Lejeune a French researcher was sent by the FAO to collection specimens of wild coffee. Until receiving the paper from the USDA I was unaware of this but the USDA received the seeds from many of these expeditions and then distributed them to the various coffee research gardens/germplasm collections around the world and to the coffee rust research center in Portugal.

I finally found the documentation showing that USDA 762 was an Ethiopian line and where it was collected from. And where it was collected from is quite interesting. Mizan Tafari. To most, that likely means nothing… unless you have spent way too much time researching the history of the Geisha cultivar. (Here is good starting point on Hacienda Esmeralda’s website.) The area in Ethiopia known as Geisha/Gesha gave birth to the varietal Panama is now famous for is very near Mizan Taferi. At first this sounded surprising, but also in the context of what was going on in coffee breeding at the time it makes perfect sense. In the 1950’s breeding programs were underway in Kenya and Tanzania as well as Central America utilizing Geisha for its leaf rust resistance. Geisha was known for having poor yields so it was crossed with other higher yielding varieties. By the late 1950s the USDA already had several introductions of Geisha/Caturra hybrids. That an expedition was sent to look for other wild varieties that might offer similar resistance and other desirable agronomic traits isn’t a surprise. The Kaffa province is also one of the areas of greatest genetic diversity in coffee and larger scale expeditions were launched in the 1960’s by FAO and ORSTROM that also made collections near Mizan Tafari and attempted to reach the site the original Geisha plants were collected from. Rust resistance was in important part of coffee breeding at the time and wild arabica coffee is where people were looking to find it. This was before the Timor hybrid became the main plant material used for rust resistance breeding. Sure enough USDA 230762 is listed as showing the same type of rust resistance as the Geisha. Given rust is a major problem in Indonesia and much of Asia it makes sense that this variety would be introduced to Indonesia. I don’t know yet but I suspect that 230762 was not the only introduction to Indonesia, but that this selection had some other desirable agronomic traits and good field performance there and was introduced to farmers there for that reason. It must have decent yields as it is even recently being recommended for planting.

Like the Geisha and many other Ethiopian lines rust resistance has largely been overcome and these plants never had the kind of resistance the Robusta hybrids exhibit. So it is only recommended now for higher elevations where rust isn’t as big of a problem. This is good news. An Ethiopian cultivar being grown in the highest elevations available at a latitude and altitude similar to its native environment. I haven’t had a chance to cup yet but some others have and I have heard the cup quality is better than other cultivars being grown. I have stumbled onto a Japanese site that suggests it maybe similar (in morphology at least) to the S4 Agaro varietal which I have cupped and can say is quite excellent and exhibits the citrus and floral qualities one generally associates with Ethiopian coffee and the Geisha. Being from very near where the Geisha was collected doesn’t mean it is genetically similar to Geisha. Quite the opposite is likely as this is a center of most of the genetic diversity in arabica.

I still have some unanswered questions. What is the morphology of this plant like? (If anyone who has been to Bali has some good pictures I would love to see them.) Was there any reason why this plant was originally collected in Ethiopia and what traits does it have that led to it being recommended for planting? Many Ethiopian lines have been experimented with around the world but few have ever been distributed to farmers. Some of the answers might be found in this report “Lejeune, J.B.H. 1958. Rapport au Gouvernement Impérial d’Ethiopie sur la production caféière. FAO, Rome, Italy.” … Another paper to try and track down.

Most people don’t think of Indonesia when they think of Ethiopian cultivars but the earliest Ethiopian coffee researched perhaps anywhere occurred there. In 1928 coffee researcher PJS Cramer in Java brought back coffee plants from Ethiopia. (see ‘A Review of Liturature of Coffee research in Indonesia’ page 103 &104)

Simply called Abyssinia (as Ethiopia was then called) Cramer had been looking to other species that might be cross bred with Arabica to produce disease resistant cultivars at the time and happily discovered resistance to rust in the Arabica plant he brought back from Ethiopia. I don’t know where to find this plant in Indonesia, though it is apparently still being recommended for planting in some areas. But it does exist in other parts of the world under a different name. That from which was distributed… Java.

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Just so you’re not thinking I’m calling out my colleagues and leaving myself out, my own Coffee Brewing Secrets DVD, features editor Ken Davids, George Howell, Oren Bloostein, Christy Thorns, Donald Schoenholt and Erna Knutsen both doing hands-on tutorials demonstrating their favorite methods and interviewed about the various other aspects such as storage, grinding, freshness. Any coffee magazine that featured an equivalent cast list and that scope of information would be a sell-out issue. Imagine having this “A” list of coffee icons at your house telling you step-by-step how to brew with each brewer. It sells a couple of copies a month on Amazon. It’s a coffee success, but to date, a market failure. My backers are still asking when they’ll start seeing a return. Hopefully, they won’t call after reading this article.

I’m perplexed.

Just over a year ago, my son told me of a project his college club, Students in Free Enterprise or SIFE, was involved in, where they were in a business competition. They were going to Guatemala to visit a coffee cooperative that supposedly offered growers the best of everything. He’s mentioned my name and my interest in coffee to his professors. Meanwhile, a second mention from a local coffee roaster sealed the deal for the professors, who wanted to see me and brainstorm if I could help with their project. The project was of interest, but it wasn’t until my wife Patricia suggested I produce a video that my enthusiasm rose.

Well, the series is completed. It’s running at www.missioncoffeecan.com and we’ve been uploading a ten minute episode per week. There are currently 14 episodes. The show has several aspects of it that I think are uniquely applied to make the coffee subject hopefully finally achieve viewer success.

First, it is a reality show, a true documentary. The students are real, we didn’t even cast them, although we did get lucky, as they are charming. While a coffee obsessive will find much to see and learn about coffee, it’s wrapped around a personal interest plot of the students competing in a national (worldwide really) event. It’s as much about business as coffee, and as much about the emerging third world where it’s grown as about the culture where it is consumed.

There are the first-choice episodes to attract the coffee connoisseur. While, as a producer, my favorite episode is “all of ‘em”, there are some standout moments if you just want to sample highlights and go back for the story and watch it full, which of course is out intention for the general viewer.

But, before I list episodes and their coffee-centered blurbs, let me say there are certain historic moments in art, where products have achieved their rightful place. Sideways is a cinematic success about wine. MTV, after years of Hollywood’s misunderstanding (and outright dislike) finally made rock music work on television.

Maybe www.missioncoffeecan.com will be a move towards coffee’s success as a web series.

Here’s a rundown, with a quick guide to the best coffee-related scenes, like dog earing a magazine to mark the articles you want to read first.

• Episode 1 – Intros of the students. No coffee, but couple of references. Start elsewhere, if coffee’s the thing.
• Episode 2 – Here we go, after a couple of minutes waking up in Guatemala, and the usual paradise shots to warm up wintry US Midwesterners, we get an initial tour of the co-op, where we’re told a few unusual factoids, including one explaining the need for reforestation to prevent mudslides – I thought is was for shade. A couple of nice coffee shots. The first time to farmer smiles, I’m ready to just buy Guatemalan coffee.
• Episode 3 – Reforestation – a whole episode on digging and planting. Once, you like the students, and you will, it’s a great episode and highlights social work the co-op does. More about environmental concerns than coffee.
• Episode 4 – This episode has a nice visit to a Mayan shrine and climaxes at a small planting of coffee at the top of the mountain. Even I knew enough Spanish to understand when the farmer tells us he uses no herbicides or pesticides (we learn they don’t need them this high up, later in the show).
• Episode 5 – Cruising by boat to various towns features just about the most beautiful footage we’ve ever shot, intercut with an interview with one of the farmers, who explains coffee botany from his perspective. Coffee lovers won’t want to miss.
• Episode 6 – Now we’re picking coffee and it’s upfront and personal. Just seeing the ruby red coffee cherries makes it for me. You’ll get to see one of our students pulling branches down so children and others (Mayans customarily reach 5 feet tall at adulthood) can reach the top branches – we didn’t see a single ladder. Then we get to see a coffee processing, part of coffee lore that most consumers never get to see.
• Episode 7 – Kristina is a beautiful Mexican-American princess who was one of the students. She is also extremely smart and ambitious – high energy all the way. She talked the farmers into giving us a special visit to one of their model farms. I call it Kristina’s Coffee Tour. This one will be a standout for many coffee hobbyists.
• Episode 10 – Three students visit the Specialty Coffee Association (SCAA) conference in Atlanta. This episode is full of coffee obsessive beauty shots and coffee celebs. Ken Davids makes a cameo appearance and if you ever wanted to meet the Technivorm’s inventor, he’s here too.
• Episode 12 – The students go to Bunn-O-Matic headquarters in Springfield. Bunn became the sponsor, but their proximity and the fact they are perhaps the only major US manufacturer might also have been a factor. Bunn was totally hands-off (not typical for sponsors) on every episode but this one. They kept saying, “people aren’t interested in all this coffee stuff”. I kept more than they wanted, but it’s interesting to hear Bunn’s resident coffee guy (Randy Pope) suggest the students “lighted up their roast”. The sales and marketing tips from Bunn execs to the students may or may not thrill you, but I found the fact that a roomful of six-figure-paid executives at a major coffee maker company would spend an afternoon with some college students – kind of touching, actually.

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There are some very good reasons Graciano and others around the world are pursuing this style. Traditional wet processing uses a lot of water and produces a lot of contaminated water. On the order of billions of gallons in just some small areas per year. Water is a precious commodity in most parts of the world and conservation is of great importance in coffee producing regions. Other modern coffee processing equipment like mechanical demucilagers, developed in Colombia, seek to minimize water usage as well. Also at many larger mills around the world coffee is mechanically dried, using very large amounts of fuel to provide heat to dry the coffee. Even if only a small percentage of a mill’s production drying of specialty coffees is in the sun, it saves energy. Luckily in El Salvador and many growing regions the harvest time for coffee is a time of warm sunny weather and drying in the sun is quite easy to do. But this isn’t so everywhere.

How do honeys taste in the cup? It varies a bit. Almost always there is an elevated perception of sweetness and enhanced aroma. Aroma may be a slightly sweeter, more intense version of the aromas in a washed version of the same coffee or may display very different berry, grape and grapefruit-like citrus notes. Acidity can be higher or lower depending on how the drying was carried out. More sweetness, better aroma, water and energy savings all sound like a win/win scenario right? Almost. Unfortunately this process doesn’t always produce simply a more distinctive coffee. It carries with it a lot of risk and it’s far easier to create a vastly inferior coffee than a better one and hard to create superior ones as consistently as one would with washed processing. Sugars and hot tropical weather or humid conditions as exist in many coffee regions don’t play so well together. Difficulty drying in less than ideal weather or from poor raking or too deep of coffee in the drying bed can easily result in mold, resulting in a flattened, dirty tasting cup. Fermentation of the fruit can also create a sour quality to the acidity, bitterness in the finish and over-ripe/off tasting fruit flavors. Sometimes these coffees also pick up vegetal, garlic and onion tastes which I at least generally find undesirable in most coffees. In El Salvador the climate is very well suited to doing this style and most of the coffees we cupped were clean and free of the tastes I described above. But in wetter more humid environments like Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Indonesia, and Hawaii (where I reside) doing this style and natural processed coffees is more risky. But good results can be accomplished.

I always encourage farmers to experiment, but to proceed with caution. I have tasted many samples from farmers who were experimenting with the styles but really didn’t know much about doing them or the risks associated with them. Often the coffees where very flawed and vastly inferior to washed coffees from same producer, in some cases almost undrinkable and not sellable. Of course poor care of washed coffees can yield terrible coffees as well. Honeys are a new emerging style, and quality and consistency should improve as more people experiment with them, share information and refine the process. Consumers looking to try these coffees should be able to find examples from El Salvador, Costa Rica, Panama, Brazil and India if they search. When they are executed well honeys can be a sweet deal for both producer and consumer.

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I had expected more commercialization. The wildlife was genuinely wild, going about its collective, dreamlike existence almost completely oblivious of the occasional pop-top minivan full of tourists and cameras. The only moment to invoke true urban cynicism occurred when one of the drivers spotted a leopard (a rare sighting apparently) and let the other drivers in the vicinity know, whereupon all the minivans in the area converged, causing a kind of traffic jam. The leopard, meanwhile, a distant lump sleeping on a dead tree branch, did absolutely nothing of note except sleep.

There are probably three – no four – reasons that fine Kenya coffees are consistently among the best in the world. Reason one: they grow in deep, old volcanic soil. Reason two: they grow at high elevations near the equator. Reason three: they are meticulously wet-processed using traditional ferment-and-wash methods – no machines scrubbing the fruit pulp off the beans as is now increasingly the case in Latin America. At least there were no such machines in evidence among the farms we visited.

Reason four for the superiority of Kenyas is controversial: to what degree are the traditional botanical varieties grown in Kenya and derived from the great heirloom Bourbon variety responsible for the amazingly rich, sweetly tart dry berry notes for which the best Kenyas are famous? These heirloom varieties are the famous SL28 and SL34 (SL stands for “Scott Laboratories”). Unfortunately, the trees of these varieties, like most other traditional varieties in Kenya, are susceptible to coffee berry disease, or CBD, the scourge of Kenya coffee.

As we dozed our way in stuffy minivans from farm to farm in Kenya my particular mission was learning more about the question that obsesses the more knowledgeable admirers of Kenya coffees: Will new plantings of a recently developed CBD-resistant, high-yielding variety of Arabica called Ruiru 11 turn Kenya coffees sappy and ordinary? Will that amazing rich black currant note, already rare, disappear entirely?

Ruiru 11 is something of a coffee scientist’s triumph, representing the culmination of years of work crossing the flavor-positive SL28 with varieties that incorporate the disease resistance of Robusta as well the genetic stability of certain other arabica varieties.

The agronomists and the farmers I spoke to at first unanimously said that Ruiru 11 tastes fine. For example, our tireless and exuberant tour leader, Etienne Delbar, Chairman of the Kenya Chapter of the East Africa Fine Coffee Association, claimed during the first night the group met that no one can tell the difference in the cup between coffee from trees of the Ruiru 11 variety and the heirloom SL28.

Maybe that one time they couldn’t. But I doubt whether they would be fooled over the long run. That elegant dry berry sensation pops up everywhere in the world where Bourbon and its derivatives are grown. Not every year, not on every farm, but regularly enough to decisively convince anyone who recognizes the note and cups enough coffees that this beautiful note is related to bourbon and bourbon-related varieties.

But once past the simple black-and-white assertion – there’s no difference, just you coffee snobs causing us hard-working farmers and smart agronomists problems – the more thoughtful agronomists I spoke to nuanced the situation. Essentially, they admitted the Ruiru 11 cup is sometimes simple and empty, but the reason, they say, is that farmers don’t prune these new Ruiru 11 trees aggressively enough, so they simply produce too much coffee with a diffused or empty character.  Cut the Ruiru 11 trees back so that they bear less fruit and the coffee they produce will taste just like coffee from the lower-bearing SL28 and SL34.

One problem is farmers may not aggressively prune their Ruiru 11 because they naturally want to produce more coffee, sell more coffee, and make more money. Hence, on a practical level, more Ruiru 11 probably will mean more ordinary tasting Kenyas entering the market. Secondly, although the Ruiru 11 coffee from strategically pruned trees may be outstanding coffee, I still doubt – at least until I taste enough samples – that it will reflect the dry berry character we treasure from the best Kenyas.

The last agronomist I spoke to was quite familiar with the dry berry character, but declared with great confidence that it has nothing to do with botanical variety and is purely owing to the influence of the deep, old volcanic soil of the prime Kenya growing areas.

In part, perhaps, but not completely. True, you can’t just grab some SL28 seed and plant it on some mountain in another part of the world and expect it to taste like the finest Kenyas. Terroir counts. But so does botanical variety. We eventually will understand better how botanical variety and terroir (the sum total impact of soil, climate, and typography) interact together to produce the handful of very distinctive coffees many of us treasure. But for now, and for Kenya, I don’t believe it’s terroir alone.

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If  one searches good examples of the typica varietal can sometimes be found from Panama, Mexico, Colombia, India, Indonesia and Hawaii.

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