Coffee varieties!
Yellow bourbon, catuai, arabica, robusta. You've probably already read these words on a coffee bag. We talk about coffee varieties today. Let's start with the large botanical family of Rubiaceae, of which the coffee tree "coffea" is a genus. This "coffea" is then divided into different species. There are 4 main species: Arabica, Canephora, Liberica and Eugenoide. Each species is further divided into varieties, each with a certain fruit size, leaf shape, yield, disease resistance, etc. All these varieties are due to mutations (morphological change of a plant compared to the type variety) or to hybridisation (natural or artificial crossing of two varieties). Let's take a few examples for arabica. Bourbon, a natural mutation of typica. Pacas and caturra, two different mutations of bourbon. Pacamara, a hybrid between pacas and maragogype. For canephora, the most cultivated variety is robusta. Arabica is often contrasted with robusta, but it is not the same botanical level since arabica is a species of the genus coffea and robusta a variety of the species canephora. Robusta has a higher yield than Arabica and is more robust, but it contains twice as much caffeine and is therefore more bitter than Arabica.
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