China’s Ideal Specialty Coffee Cultivar Could be a F1 Hybrid
By Mark Pendergrast
Retail sales of coffee were $8.2 billion (RMB58.3 billion) in 2019 and are expected to increase annually by 11.3% through 2023. The market’s largest segment remains instant coffee but sales of freshly brewed coffee accounted for $746.3 million of the total with a projected growth rate of 10.4%. Per capita consumption is still tiny at 0.08 kilos but the burgeoning coffee culture is rapidly growing.
By 2023 75% of spending in China’s coffee segment will be attributable to out of home consumption. To meet this demand, can Yunnan, which supplies 95% of China’s coffee, provide sufficient quantities of locally grown specialty coffee that scores 86 or higher on the quality cupping scale?
That’s a good question, one that is still unanswered. The coffee leaf rust epidemic of the late 19th century wiped out virtually all of the plants introduced by missionaries in the 1850s. The disease has now spread around the coffee-growing world rendering original varietals, many that produced excellent coffee, vulnerable.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Nestlé, in collaboration with Hogood and with sponsorship by the World Bank, began to offer catimor seedlings to be planted by tea farmers. Catimor varieties are a hybrid of robusta (with higher caffeine content, generally lesser quality, but resistant to leaf rust) and arabica. Such trees offer relatively high yields but their quality is generally inadequate to qualify as specialty coffee. Most of this coffee is harvested to make soluble coffee and concentrate. The better-quality arabicas suitable for export routinely sell for as little as $1 a pound in the current market. The beans are used in arabica blends rather than sold for the more profitable prices that higher quality specialty arabica commands.
In 2002 AiNi Coffee, in Simao, joined forces with Starbucks, helping to introduce locally grown specialty coffee to China. The goal was to attain scores of at least 80 points on the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) cupping scale. In 2013, coffee became available online to Chinese consumers through Tmall, and the following year the Yunnan Coffee Exchange was created. Chinese trained to become Q graders establishing a cadre of skilled cuppers. But coffee grown in Yunnan, mostly catimor, achieved cupping scores only in the low 80s – not sufficient to garner higher prices.
Now Chinese coffee companies and growers are determined to find a tree variety that will thrive in Yunnan, resist coffee leaf rust, and score in the high 80s or even 90s, to command specialty prices. This group, called Project +86, started in 2018, aims to develop locally roasted coffee that cups at 86 or higher.
One of the possible saviors is the sarchimor variety, which was created from a natural Timor hybrid of arabica and robusta, crossed with Villa Sarchi, a dwarf arabica variant discovered in Costa Rica. The hybrid was created just in time to counter coffee leaf rust when it reached Latin America.
Eric Baden is the founder of the Coffee Commune in Shanghai, a wholesaler and chain of coffee shops within China and Germany. He heads the Project +86 initiative. “There are several farms trying sachimor that have reported encouraging first results. Once we tie down our own model farm we will also plant it,” he said.
In use on the large Aini farm in Yunnan, it appears to offer some hope for a rust-resistant hybrid that might score high enough for specialty sales. Aini said the plants produce quality coffee with at yield per hectare of around 95% of catimor grown there.
The World Coffee Research’s spokesman, Hanna Neuschwander, cautions that, without extensive testing, it is impossible to say whether sarchimor will be the savior of Chinese coffee. “Perhaps most important of all, everything in our catalog… comes from testing and production in a very different environment from Yunnan,” says Neuschwander. “At 25 degrees North, it’s one of the highest latitude production zones for coffee, and really very little testing has been done to find the right varieties for this zone,” she said.
“What you ideally want is some kind of large multilocation trial to test a good array of varieties in that particular environment to find the right match (and, in the long run, to have a breeding program set up to develop new varieties tailored to that environment). We had been in some discussions about bringing our international multilocation variety trial to China, but so far, we don’t have an agreement in place.”
In addition, rust-resistant varieties are gradually adapting, similarly to bugs that become resistant to antibiotics, so it is unclear whether current varieties will become susceptible world-wide in time. Finally, “sarchimor” comes in different varieties, all of which can be unstable as the seeds are propagated.
Tim Heinze, former head of Yunnan Coffee Traders, also cautions that sarchimor is unlikely to be a magical solution for the Chinese specialty coffee industry. “The planting of new varietals and cultivars is a very interesting discussion here in China,” he says. “There are various facets and ways one can look at it. My fear is that many people view this as the ‘silver bullet,’ to slay the low prices of coffee and make coffee farming economically viable; however, I just don’t see that it is as straightforward as that. There is also limited focus being put on scientific and thorough research on what new varietals will be successful here. It’s more the ‘throw a dart at the wall and hope it sticks’ mentality.”
Heinze is convinced that the answer to higher quality in China is proper harvest and processing. “I try to not be too analytical, but if you run the numbers, I just have a hard time seeing how investment in new varieties/cultivars is the large-scale answer to helping local farmers.
I believe the better focus of time, energy, resources is on improving processing standards, focusing on soil health, plant nutrition, plant spacing, pruning practices, better controlled drying, innovation in fermentation, and not to mention…PICKING RIPE CHERRIES!!” Using such methods, Heinze’s clients have produced coffee with scores over 84. Thus, it seems that a combination of tests of different varietals, including sarchimor, plus careful processing, may lead to the plus-86 scores sought by Aini and others in Yunnan.