Bourbon Coffee Variety: History, Taste and What to Buy
Key takeaways
Bourbon is a coffee variety named after Île Bourbon, today's Réunion, where the French planted coffee from Yemen in the early 1700s. It has nothing to do with whiskey.
It is everywhere: 1,305 Bourbon lots are in stock from 482 roasters, about one in every eleven coffees on Cuppd.
Most of it hides in mixes. 1,014 of those lots list another variety too, most often Caturra (570), and only 291 are pure Bourbon.
Pure Bourbon is an East African thing now: Rwanda and Burundi supply 135 of the 291 single-variety lots.
Expect chocolate and caramel (26% and 22% of lots), with strawberry turning up on 10% of naturals against 1% of washed lots.
Questions this article answers
What is Bourbon coffee?
Does Bourbon coffee have alcohol in it?
What does Bourbon coffee taste like?
What is the difference between Red, Yellow and Pink Bourbon?
Is Bourbon coffee rare?
Where is the best Bourbon coffee grown?
First, the awkward bit: Bourbon coffee has no whiskey in it. The name comes from Île Bourbon, a French island in the Indian Ocean that is now called Réunion, and the coffee planted there three hundred years ago became one of the two great family trees of Arabica.
It is also, quietly, one of the most common things you can buy. 1,305 coffees listing Bourbon are in stock on Cuppd right now, from 482 roasters in 37 countries — roughly one bag in every eleven. Most people drink it without ever reading the word on the label. Here is where it came from, what it turned into, what it tastes like across those 1,305 bags, and which ones to start with.
Bourbon in stock right now
Where does Bourbon coffee come from?
From Yemen, by way of a very small island. In the early 1700s the French brought coffee trees from Yemen to Île Bourbon, and the variety that grew there took the island's name. It then stayed put for well over a century — World Coffee Research notes it did not leave the island until the mid-1800s.
Fun fact
The whole variety went through a bottleneck the size of one tree. Of the plants landed on the island in September 1715, a single tree was producing offspring by 1718 — and by 1720 its descendants numbered around 7,000.
When it did travel, it travelled fast. Bourbon reached Brazil around 1860 and spread north through Central and South America from there. In 1868 French Spiritan missionaries from Réunion carried it to Zanzibar and to Bagamoyo on the Tanzanian coast, which is the start of the Bourbon-type coffee grown across East Africa today.
The trees are tall, give a medium crop and taste very good at altitude. The catch is disease: World Coffee Research rates Bourbon's resistance to coffee leaf rust and coffee berry disease as low. That one weakness explains most of what happened next.
Variety: a genetically distinct type of coffee plant, the way Granny Smith and Pink Lady are both apples. Bourbon is a variety; Brazil or Rwanda is where it grows.
What varieties come from Bourbon?
A large share of modern coffee. Farmers who loved the cup but not the tall, fragile tree kept selecting new plants out of it, and in Latin America Bourbon has mostly been replaced by its own descendants. The best-known is Caturra, a natural dwarf mutation found in Minas Gerais, Brazil, between 1915 and 1918. A single gene makes the tree compact, so you can plant more of them per hectare. Caturra alone has 1,911 lots in stock on Cuppd, more than Bourbon itself.
El Salvador found its own dwarf Bourbon in 1949 on the Pacas family farm in Santa Ana, and called it Pacas. Cross Pacas with the giant-beaned Maragogipe and you get Pacamara, the Salvadoran variety that so often tops the country's Cup of Excellence. In Kenya, Scott Agricultural Laboratories picked a single drought-tolerant tree out of a Tanganyikan population in 1935; it became SL28, and genetic testing places it in the Bourbon group too.
Then there are the colours. Red Bourbon is the original. Yellow Bourbon turned up on a farm near Pederneiras in São Paulo state around 1930, possibly a natural cross between Red Bourbon and a yellow-fruited Typica; its colour comes from a recessive gene. On Cuppd these are separate names: Red Bourbon has 381 lots in stock and Yellow Bourbon 199, and neither is counted in this page's 1,305.
And then there is Pink Bourbon, which is named like a family member and, according to its DNA, is not one. That story gets its own page.
What does Bourbon coffee taste like?
Sweet, round and chocolatey — the cup people mean when they say 'balanced'. Across the 1,305 in-stock lots, roasters printed 209 different tasting notes, and the top of the list is a dessert trolley: chocolate on 339 lots (26%), caramel on 292 (22%), then milk chocolate (12%), dark chocolate (11%) and cocoa (10%). Almond and hazelnut follow at about 8% each.
Processing moves it, but less than you might expect. Washed is the big camp at 883 lots, two thirds of the total; natural accounts for 365. Washed Bourbon keeps the caramel and adds almond, honey and orange. Natural Bourbon goes deeper and fruitier: hazelnut rises to 12% of naturals, and strawberry appears on 9.6% of them against just 1.4% of washed lots.
Where it grows matters more. Brazilian Bourbon is the most chocolate-heavy of all — chocolate on 40% of its 196 lots, hazelnut on 23%. Guatemalan Bourbon keeps the chocolate (30%) but brings plum and cherry on about one lot in ten. And the East African lots are the brightest, which is where the next section comes in.
Latin American Bourbon — caramel, chocolate, nuts
Where is pure Bourbon coffee grown today?
Mostly in Rwanda and Burundi, which surprises people who expect Latin America. Here is the thing about those 1,305 lots: 1,014 of them list another variety alongside Bourbon. Caturra shares the bag on 570, Typica on 406, Catuai on 370. In Guatemala, Peru and Brazil, Bourbon usually grows in the same field as its descendants and is picked, processed and sold together with them.
Only 291 lots are Bourbon and nothing else, and 135 of those come from just two countries: Rwanda (81) and Burundi (54). Guatemala, the biggest Bourbon origin overall at 265 lots, has 19 pure ones. If you want to taste the variety on its own, East Africa is where the shelf actually is: florals, honey, black tea and orange on top of the caramel.
Single-variety lot: coffee from trees of one variety only. Many farms grow several varieties side by side and sell them together, which is perfectly good coffee but tells you less about any one of them.
Pure Bourbon from Rwanda and Burundi
Which roasters sell the most Bourbon coffee?
Nobody dominates it, which is the point. Bourbon is so widespread that 482 roasters stock at least one, 201 of them exactly one, and 70 carry five or more. The top two hold 51 lots between them — under 4% of the total. Compare that with Geisha, where two shops hold about one lot in seven.
So the useful question is not who has the most, but who has the most interesting spread. Five Senses in Perth has the deepest list at 30 lots across nine origins, and leans East African: nine from Burundi and four from Rwanda. Red Rooster in the US and Coffeelink in the UK tie for second on 21, and they could hardly be more different. Red Rooster is the fruit-forward one, with 11 naturals among its 21; Coffeelink is 19 of 21 washed and spreads them over 14 origins, from Jamaica to Kenya.
It is also more of a European shelf than you might guess. Roasters in the UK list 311 Bourbon lots, more than US roasters (233), with Germany (103), Poland (85) and Hungary (75) behind them. Bourbon is the everyday specialty coffee of a lot of European cafés: the house filter, the single-origin espresso, the bag that sells every week.
Behind them the list stays flat: Cafés San Agustín at 17, Olisipo at 15, then Coda and Gento at 14 each. Gento is the odd one in a good way — a Guatemalan roaster whose 14 Bourbon lots all come from Guatemala. With a variety this common, the single-bag shops are not a lesser option; a lot of very good Bourbon is someone's one house coffee.
How should you buy your first Bourbon coffee?
Start with a washed, single-variety lot from Rwanda or Burundi. It is the clearest view of the variety on its own: caramel sweetness, florals or orange on top, and a black-tea finish. Then try a Guatemalan or Peruvian Bourbon blend from the same roaster and notice how much rounder and more chocolatey it is.
Bourbon is forgiving to brew. It makes a sweet espresso and a clean filter, and the chocolate-and-caramel side holds up well in milk. Medium is the most common labelled roast (511 lots), though if a roaster offers a light one from East Africa, that is where the fruit shows.
And do not skip the blends and the decafs. 85 of the lots are sold as named blends and 94 are decaf — Bourbon's sweetness is exactly what a roaster wants underneath an espresso blend or carrying a decaf through processing. A Bourbon-heavy house blend is usually a safe bet for a milk drink.
The short version: Bourbon is the dependable middle of specialty coffee, and the reason so many other varieties exist. Browse all 1,305 Bourbon coffees in stock, pick a pure one to start, and rate it on Cuppd so the next person knows which lot was worth it.
How did we count 1,305 Bourbon coffees?
Every number on this page is a count from the Cuppd catalogue, not an estimate. Specifically:
- Source: the product listings on 940 specialty roasters' own online shops, not marketplaces or resellers. A coffee counts once per roaster shop; brands with two shops, such as Onyx's US and EU stores, are counted as one roaster.
- In stock: every coffee is re-checked against the roaster's shop once a month. All 1,305 Bourbon lots here were confirmed available on 2 October 2026.
- Variety: as the roaster labels it, matched to the catalogue name 'Bourbon' and nothing else. Red Bourbon (381 lots), Yellow Bourbon (199), Pink Bourbon (269) and Orange Bourbon (14) are recorded as separate varieties and are not in these figures, nor are descendants such as Caturra.
- What counts: any coffee whose roaster lists Bourbon among its varieties. 291 of the 1,305 are Bourbon only; 1,014 list other varieties too, 198 combine more than one origin, and 85 are named as blends (these overlap).
- Tasting notes: the roaster's own notes, mapped onto a shared vocabulary of 330 notes so that 'milk choc' and 'milk chocolate' count once. A lot can carry several notes and processes, so shares do not add up to 100%.
- Not ranked: nothing here is scored or sponsored. Roasters are ordered by how many Bourbon lots they stock, nothing else.
Bourbon on the price index
October 2026€56 per kg at the median, −3% vs all coffees. Half of Bourbon coffees cost between €47 and €66/kg, across 1,154 coffees from 467 roasters.
See the Cuppd Specialty Coffee Price Index →