Picture a coffee tree. Tall and conical, one vertical trunk, long lateral branches bending under red cherry, young leaves flushed bronze at the tips. This is the coffee plant in the botanical illustration, the coffee plant on the packaging. It is Typica, and it feels like it got there without anybody choosing it.
Typica grows to four metres and beyond if you let it – which is why regular pruning occurs so workers can pick the cherries more easily. It has a low yield, no useful resistance to leaf rust, coffee berry disease, or to nematodes. Its beans are elongated and on the larger side, its cup has a long reputation for sweetness and clarity.
Coffee plant (Coffea arabica): flowering and fruiting stem with floral segments. Coloured engraving with etching by J. Miller, c. 1774, after S. Taylor. Wellcome Collection
Arabica came out of the montane forests of southwestern Ethiopia, where wild trees still stand across the border on the Boma Plateau in South Sudan. It reached Yemen in the 1400s or 1500s and stopped being a wild plant. Two centuries of terraced farming there made coffee into a crop and a traded commodity long before anyone in Europe saw the tree.
It came out of Yemen and was grown on in India. From the Malabar coast, the Dutch shipped it on to Batavia in the closing years of the 1600s, a ‘company town’ belonging to the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or Dutch East India Company (VOC) on the isle of Java. An earthquake estimated to be around 7.5- 8 hit Batavia on the morning of 5 January 1699; trees came down, landslides and mudflows around Mount Salak choked the Ciliwung and the river filled with sediment. Clean water and transport went, and the coffee disappeared with them. They sent for more. Malabar supplied again, and a further consignment came in through Surat, the VOC company’s factory in Gujarat, and its waystation for the Arabia trade. It was the same arabica off the same Yemeni stock either way. What matters for this story is how little of it there was. A handful of seeds. Everything that follows comes out of that handful and it is here the story of Typica truly begins.
A single plant was sent from Java to the Hortus Botanicus in Amsterdam, and from Amsterdam the burgomasters handed one to the French crown. At this point, the tree stops being cargo and becomes a gift between states, at 5 foot high and with cherry, encased in a glass ‘machine’. From Paris it went to Martinique in the care of Gabriel de Clieu, giving rise to the washed process as it did so. From Amsterdam it went to Dutch Guiana, on to Cayenne and from Cayenne, into northern Brazil where Francisco de Melo Palheta had gone to arbitrate a border dispute and came home with seed tucked into flowers from the governor’s wife. The English carried it from Martinique to Jamaica. It reached Santo Domingo, crossed to Cuba, and Cuba later supplied Costa Rica and El Salvador.
At each of these steps, somebody moved coffee. It was not evaluated and compared in the way we have come to expect. Amsterdam did not audition its stock before handing a specimen to a king because a coffee tree was a diplomatic object and a status symbol. De Clieu took what was in front of him. Palheta was given seed off the only trees in the colony. There was no runner-up, no rejected candidate, no note in a ledger explaining why this one and not that. Coffee did not work that way yet.
Typica did the rest by itself. Arabica runs about nine parts in ten, self-pollinating – so near enough is true from seed. A farmer holding back beans and sowing them got back what he had planted. With a need to propagate steering it through the various nations it was introduced to, and you have the very ordinary business of planting what you already have, running for two hundred years.
Until the 1940s most of the coffee planted across South and Central America was this tree. It picked up names as it went, Criollo, Indio, Arábigo, Plume Hidalgo, Sumatra. Many names for a plant nobody had chosen, bringing an element of their own story with them. But they were all, and still are, Typica.
The name arrived in 1913 with P.J.S. Cramer, a Dutch agronomist with the colonial agriculture department in the Dutch East Indies. He published it as Coffea arabica var. typica in the department’s Mededeelingen, (volume 11, page 126), a survey of the coffees then grown across the Indies. It was over two hundred years after the plant left Java that somebody actually wrote what it was, down.
The word means what it looks like and had become, ‘typical’. Under the convention of the day, when a species was split into varieties, the one matching the original description took the epithet ‘typica’, or ‘type form’. This is an old convention since abolished, the correct designation today is Coffea arabica var. arabica. It’s an example of the Founder Effect in population genetics, where a small number of individuals carry through to become the whole gene pool.
You can still buy Typica. Peru and the Dominican Republic grow it in quantity, Jamaica keeps it synonymously in the Blue Mountains, Hawaii keeps it in Kona, and it surfaces in old Latin American plots under its other names. It stays for different reasons on different farms, be that tradition, inactivity, economics or availability. Anyone wanting more yield, a shorter tree, or a plant that could take rust, began from this one because simply put, this one was what there was. The plant that got where it is by happenstance is now kept on purpose.
