Pink Bourbon is not a Bourbon. Its genes are Ethiopian.

Pink Bourbon is not a Bourbon. Two rounds of DNA testing, commissioned by the importer Cafe Imports in 2017 and 2023, placed it with Ethiopian landraces. The name came from the Bourbon trees it was found growing among.

Pink Bourbon, Bourbon Rosado in Spanish, is a variety of arabica grown mostly in Huila, in southern Colombia. Its cherries ripen orange-pink, closer to salmon than to red. Producers and roasters describe its cup in the terms used for washed Ethiopian coffees and for Gesha: jasmine and white flowers, citrus, peach, a honeyed sweetness.

Why it was called Bourbon

The trees grow tall, as Bourbon does. Cafe Imports traces its own first sighting to November 2014, when Luis Arocha, one of its green coffee buyers, saw tall, scraggly trees with pink cherries growing among Bourbon in Colombia and traced them to a nearby farm. The coffee was taken for a spontaneous cross between red and yellow Bourbon, and the name stuck.

Other accounts begin earlier. Rodrigo Sánchez Valencia, of Finca Monteblanco, says his team at Aromas del Sur found it in 2013, and that it first appeared around San Adolfo, in the municipality of Acevedo, in the 1980s.

What the DNA tests found

Cafe Imports had Pink Bourbon tested twice.

• 2017, DNA Analytica. Leaves from two Pink Bourbon trees, one tall and one short, proved "similar to wild plants coming from Ethiopia", though not an exact match: the matches were in the low 80% range, where tests of other coffees have matched at 95–100%.
• 2023, RD2 Vision. The coffee geneticist Christophe Montagnon tested five samples from five producers in Colombia and Costa Rica, four sold as Pink Bourbon and one as Orange Bourbon. His conclusion: "All five are containing Pink Bourbon, which has nothing to do with Bourbon, as it is an Ethiopian landrace."

Only one of the five samples was Pink Bourbon alone. Two were mixed with Bourbon, and two with Catimor genetics consistent with Castillo, the rust-resistant variety planted across Colombia. The sample sold as Orange Bourbon contained Pink Bourbon too.

Cafe Imports' account of the results describes Pink Bourbon as distinct from other Ethiopian landraces such as Gesha, and not a recent hybrid. The seedlings of a first-generation hybrid scatter into different types; producers have saved and shared Pink Bourbon's seed for years, and its trees have stayed consistent.

A landrace is a population of coffee selected by producers over generations rather than bred by a programme. Bourbon belongs to another lineage. French missionaries took it from Yemen to the island of Bourbon, now Réunion, in the early 1700s, and it reached Brazil around 1860. World Coffee Research places it in the Bourbon-Typica group.

How an Ethiopian coffee reached Huila

No one has documented it. Cafe Imports thinks it may have been brought in as a parent for breeding or, as Montagnon proposes, to widen the local pool of coffee genetics. It calls a third idea less likely because of the scale involved: that someone meant to bring in Gesha seed from Ethiopia and received Pink Bourbon instead. Seed mix-ups do happen. In 2020 World Coffee Research reported DNA tests on more than 2,500 coffee samples from farms, seed lots and nurseries; the samples sold as Gesha matched the reference Gesha only 39% of the time.

Ethiopian coffees have taken long routes before. Gesha was collected in Ethiopia in the 1930s and reached Panama by way of Tanzania and Costa Rica, handed out for its tolerance to leaf rust.

It isn't the only one

Pink Bourbon is not the only prized Latin American variety that has turned out to be Ethiopian. In a 2022 study led by Christophe Montagnon, Chiroso, from Urrao in Antioquia, fell into the same Core Ethiopian group as Gesha and Pink Bourbon. Summarising a 2024 testing programme, Montagnon, of RD2 Vision, and Bianca Serito, of Lavazza, place Gesha, Chiroso and Sidra in that Core Ethiopian group.

Growers from 24 countries entered a draw, and 100 of them had their favourite plants tested. A third of the varieties the growers believed they had were something else. A variety name on a sack is a claim; a DNA test is evidence. Ethiopia's own coffees have the opposite problem: a bag that says heirloom names no variety at all.

How it grows

Producers in Huila describe it as productive and demanding. Edinson Argote, of Quebraditas, recommends planting it near 2,000 metres to keep anthracnose in check, and says its yields call for stricter fertilising. Its colour can confuse pickers, who have to take only ripe cherries.

On disease, reports conflict. Rodrigo Sánchez Valencia says it held up against leaf rust when rust reached the region in the 1980s; a grower in Brazil keeps his trees in a protected environment because they are very susceptible to fungal disease.

Its success now has a cost. In September 2026 a producer told Perfect Daily Grind that so much washed Pink Bourbon is on the market that prices have fallen.

The Pink Bourbon we roast

Ours comes from Finca El Diviso, above Pitalito in the south of Huila, at 1,750–1,850 metres. José Uribe first planted coffee there; his grandsons, Nestor and Adrian Lasso, run it now and work out their own fermentations. This lot is an anaerobic natural: the cherries ferment in sealed containers, without air, then dry whole.

We roast it medium-light, for filter and espresso. Our tasting notes: strawberry, guava and milk chocolate. Its brew card is a V60: 17 g of coffee to 250 g of water at 88–90 °C.

On its product page it is listed as Pink Bourbon, and its description says it is an Ethiopian landrace.

Sources: Cafe Imports on the DNA tests · Sprudge · Perfect Daily Grind on the variety's history and growing it in 2026 · World Coffee Research on Bourbon and genetic conformity · Montagnon and Serito, 2024 · Montagnon and others, 2022