Pink Bourbon Coffee: Not a Bourbon, Still Worth Buying
Key takeaways
Despite the name, Pink Bourbon is not a Bourbon: genetic fingerprinting in 2017 and again in 2023 placed it with Ethiopian landraces.
It is almost entirely Colombian: 258 of the 269 Pink Bourbon lots in stock on Cuppd come from Colombia, and 131 are tagged Huila.
It tastes like the Ethiopian it is: floral leads (13% of lots), with raspberry close behind; chocolate, Bourbon's signature, is on only 11%, against 26% of Bourbons.
Three in ten lots go through anaerobic or other fermentation processes, so read the process line before you buy.
169 roasters stock it, but 112 of them have exactly one — it is a feature bag, not a staple.
Questions this article answers
What is Pink Bourbon coffee?
Is Pink Bourbon actually a Bourbon?
What does Pink Bourbon coffee taste like?
Is Pink Bourbon coffee rare?
Is Pink Bourbon better than Geisha?
Where does Pink Bourbon come from?
Pink Bourbon has one of the best names in coffee and one of the least accurate. The cherries really are pink. The Bourbon part, it turns out, is wrong: when people finally ran its DNA, it came back Ethiopian.
None of which has slowed it down. 269 Pink Bourbon coffees are in stock on Cuppd right now, from 169 roasters in 31 countries, and 258 of them come from Colombia. This is the honest version: what it actually is, why it tastes the way it does, which part of Colombia grows it, and where to buy one.
Pink Bourbon in stock right now
Is Pink Bourbon actually a Bourbon?
No. For years the story was that Pink Bourbon was a natural cross between Red and Yellow Bourbon, which sounds tidy — red plus yellow, pink cherries. Then people started testing it. Genetic fingerprinting run for the importer Caravela Coffee in 2017 placed it with Ethiopian landraces. Café Imports had its own samples tested the same year by DNA Analytica and got the same direction: about 86% similarity to wild Ethiopian coffee.
Ethiopian landrace: coffee descended from the wild and semi-wild trees of Ethiopia, rather than from the narrow Yemen-to-Réunion line that produced Bourbon and Typica. Geisha is one too.
In 2023 Café Imports went back with five samples from different farms in Colombia and Costa Rica, four sold as Pink Bourbon and one as Orange Bourbon, and sent them to RD2 Vision. The answer from geneticist Christophe Montagnon was blunt: all five contained Pink Bourbon, 'which has nothing to do with Bourbon, as it is an Ethiopian landrace.' Only one sample was pure; two were mixed with true Bourbon and two with Catimor. Which tells you something else useful: a bag labelled Pink Bourbon may come from a field that is not 100% Pink Bourbon.
Does any of this change what is in your cup? No. The trees are the same trees they were before anyone sent a leaf to a lab; only the family label moved. What the genetics does explain is the flavour, which has always tasted more like Ethiopia than like Bourbon. That is the next section's job.
So why does Cuppd still file it under the Bourbon group? Because roasters print 'Pink Bourbon' on the bag, and we sort by what the bag says. Moving it is a decision we have not made yet. We would rather tell you here than pretend the name is right.
Where does Pink Bourbon coffee come from?
Southern Huila, in Colombia. Rodrigo Sánchez Valencia of the exporter Aromas del Sur told Perfect Daily Grind that his team found it in 2013, and that they believe it first appeared around San Adolfo, in the municipality of Acevedo, in the 1980s. His account is that farmers started planting more of it, without knowing what it was, because it held up against leaf rust when the disease reached the region.
Café Imports tells its own side: in November 2014 its buyer Luis Arocha noticed pink-fruited trees and traced them back to the farm. The two stories do not contradict each other. Pink Bourbon is what a lot of specialty discoveries look like — trees nobody planted on purpose, noticed by someone who knew what odd cherries might mean.
Fun fact
Pink Bourbon is still close to home. 258 of the 269 lots in stock are Colombian, 131 are tagged Huila, and four are tagged San Adolfo itself. Only 11 lots in the whole catalogue have no Colombian coffee in them at all.
Those 11 are spread thin: Burundi has two, Brazil, Peru, Honduras and Mexico one each, and the rest name no origin at all. They are worth trying precisely because they are rare, but they are not yet a second home for the variety.
Pink Bourbon beyond Colombia
What does Pink Bourbon coffee taste like?
Like an Ethiopian coffee wearing a Colombian passport. Across the 269 lots, roasters used 164 different tasting notes, and floral leads with 36 lots (13%). Then chocolate (11%), raspberry and caramel (both 10.8%), and peach and strawberry (both 8.9%). No single note dominates the way jasmine dominates Geisha; the character is a general bright, fruity, floral cup.
The contrast with true Bourbon is the clearest evidence you can taste. Chocolate is on 26% of Bourbon lots and only 11% of Pink Bourbon. Floral goes the other way: 5% of Bourbon, 13% of Pink Bourbon. If the genetics paper feels abstract, a side-by-side cup is not.
Washed is the main camp at 165 lots, about six in ten. Washed Pink Bourbon puts floral first (17% of washed lots), then chocolate (13%), raspberry (12%) and peach (11%) — clean, bright, berry-sweet. That is the version to buy if you want to know what the variety itself tastes like.
Washed — floral, raspberry, peach
Why is so much Pink Bourbon fermented?
Because Huila is where Colombia's processing experiments live, and Pink Bourbon grows right in the middle of them. 85 of the 269 lots, three in ten, go through a fermentation-style process: anaerobic (45), co-fermentation (19), double fermentation (9), carbonic maceration (8) and more. For comparison, true Bourbon sits at about 6%. If you want the background, our anaerobic coffee explainer covers what happens in the tank.
Co-fermentation: the coffee ferments alongside added fruit, yeast or other ingredients, which can push flavours like passion fruit or peach into the cup. Roasters usually say so on the bag; when they don't, the tasting notes tend to give it away.
The fermented lots taste noticeably different. Peach and strawberry appear on 18% and 16% of anaerobic Pink Bourbon, and on honey-processed lots mango and caramel each hit 26%. These are great coffees in their own right, but they tell you more about the mill than about the tree. Buy one second, not first.
Natural and fermented — strawberry, mango, passion fruit
Which roasters sell the most Pink Bourbon?
Most roasters treat it as a guest coffee. Of the 169 roasters with Pink Bourbon in stock, 112 carry exactly one, and only five carry five or more. The top two, Cafés San Agustín in León, Spain (10 lots) and 7 grams in Milan (6), hold 16 lots between them, about 6% of the total.
It is also a particularly American enthusiasm. US roasters list 59 of the 269 lots, more than a fifth of the total, against 22 from the UK and 17 each from Spain and the Czech Republic. Compare true Bourbon, where UK roasters list more than US ones.
What separates the deep lists is spread. Cafés San Agustín runs the full range — washed, natural and anaerobic, mostly from around Pitalito and Acevedo in Huila. 7 grams is the experimental end: four of its six are anaerobic, three honey. And Red Rooster in Floyd, Virginia, is the one for carbonic maceration: two of its five lots, alongside three naturals.
Passenger in Lancaster also has six lots, level with 7 grams, and is missing from the cards only because none of its listings yet carries the full provenance data we require before linking a coffee — a data gap, not a verdict on the coffee. Vivina's in Budapest matches Red Rooster on five. Behind them the field flattens to four lots or fewer, and the single-bag shops matter more here than usual: with 112 of them, most of the variety's range lives one lot at a time.
How should you buy your first Pink Bourbon?
Pick a washed lot from a named farm in Huila or Cauca, roasted light. Light is the most common labelled roast for this variety (100 lots against 58 medium), and it is the one that keeps the florals. Brew it as filter, drink it black, and taste it next to a regular washed Colombian if you can; the difference is the whole point. And unlike true Bourbon, you rarely have to dig for a pure one: 217 of the 269 lots are Pink Bourbon and nothing else, so the bag you pick almost certainly tastes of this variety alone.
One more surprise in the data: 29 of the 269 lots are decaf, about one in ten, against 7% for true Bourbon. If you drink decaf in the afternoon, Pink Bourbon is one of the more interesting varieties to look for on the label, because a fruit-forward coffee has more to keep through the decaf process.
Then go sideways. A fermented Pink Bourbon is a fun second bag, and if the floral side hooks you, Sidra is the next Colombian-grown Ethiopian-type coffee to try.
Pink Bourbon is a coffee with the wrong name and the right cup. Browse all 269 Pink Bourbon coffees in stock, pick a washed one, and rate it on Cuppd so the next person knows which farm was worth it.
How did we count 269 Pink 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 269 Pink Bourbon lots here were confirmed available on 2 October 2026.
- Variety: as the roaster labels it, matched to the catalogue name 'Pink Bourbon' only. Orange Bourbon (14 lots) is recorded separately and not counted. Cuppd's catalogue still files Pink Bourbon under the Bourbon group, even though the genetic evidence above says Ethiopian landrace; this page follows the genetics, the taxonomy has not caught up yet.
- What counts: any coffee whose roaster lists Pink Bourbon among its varieties. 217 of the 269 are Pink Bourbon only; 52 list other varieties too, 14 combine more than one origin, and 29 are decaf.
- Tasting notes: the roaster's own notes, mapped onto a shared vocabulary of 330 notes. 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 Pink Bourbon lots they stock, nothing else.
Pink Bourbon on the price index
October 2026€84 per kg at the median, +46% vs all coffees. Half of Pink Bourbon coffees cost between €68 and €107/kg, across 254 coffees from 170 roasters.
See the Cuppd Specialty Coffee Price Index →