· 4 min read
What is Pink Bourbon coffee?
Pink Bourbon coffee explained: where the name came from, why the cherries ripen pink, the DNA tests that say it is no Bourbon, and why Huila grows it.
Pink Bourbon is a coffee tree from southern Huila, in Colombia, whose cherries ripen to a salmon pink instead of red. Growers named it for that color and because it turned up among Bourbon trees, but two rounds of DNA testing point to an Ethiopian landrace rather than a Bourbon. It is grown for a bright, floral cup, and it is one of the two trees in our Colombia.
Where the name comes from
The tree first appeared in the 1980s around San Adolfo, in the municipality of Acevedo, in the far south of Huila. That is the account of Rodrigo Sánchez Valencia, whose company Aromas del Sur was among the first to grow it as a crop of its own, as he told Perfect Daily Grind in 2023. The coffee buyer and writer Christopher Feran also places its discovery near Acevedo in the 1980s.
The trees were tall and a little scraggly, and they grew mixed in with Bourbon, which is not common in Colombia. Their fruit ripened somewhere between red and yellow. Farmers already knew red Bourbon and yellow Bourbon, so the obvious guess was a natural cross of the two, and the tree became Bourbon Rosado. In English, Pink Bourbon.
Why the cherries ripen pink
The red in a ripe coffee cherry comes mostly from anthocyanins, the pigments that also color red grapes. Researchers at Pu'er University in China, writing in the journal PeerJ in 2026, compared arabica trees with purple, pink and yellow fruit. They found that the main red pigment, and total anthocyanins, fell from purple skins to pink skins and fell again to yellow. None of their trees was Pink Bourbon, and we have not found published work on Pink Bourbon's own skin. So the fair answer is that pink cherries carry less red pigment than red ones, and nobody has yet shown why this tree makes less.
For pickers it means learning a new color for ripe. A Pink Bourbon cherry that looks underripe to someone used to red fruit may be exactly ready.
The DNA tests
The first test came in 2017. The lab DNA Analytica compared leaves from two Pink Bourbon plants, one tall and one short, and found both close to wild coffee from Ethiopia.
The second came in 2023. The green coffee importer Cafe Imports sent five samples, four sold as Pink Bourbon and one as Orange Bourbon, from farms in Colombia and Costa Rica, to RD2 Vision. That firm is run by Christophe Montagnon, a coffee geneticist who was named scientific director of World Coffee Research in 2016. As Cafe Imports reported, 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.
Two cautions. These are commercial tests published by an importer, not a peer reviewed paper, so "probably not a Bourbon" is the honest way to put it. And the mixed samples mean a lot sold as Pink Bourbon may be partly something else. Growers who want it pure keep it apart from their other trees.
How an Ethiopian landrace reached Huila is unknown. In a 2024 essay on mistaken identities, Feran sums up the testing: Pink Bourbon "was in fact not Bourbon at all, but an Ethiopian landrace." Our guide to Ethiopian heirloom coffee explains why so many of those trees never had names to begin with.
Why Huila growers plant it
Rust came first. Coffee leaf rust was first recorded in Colombia in 1983, according to researchers at Cenicafé, the country's coffee research center. Feran writes that Pink Bourbon first spread among farmers because of its apparent resistance to rust, and Sánchez Valencia says the same. That is grower experience, not a published field trial, and we would treat it that way. World Coffee Research puts both true Bourbon and Caturra in its lowest category for rust resistance, so a tree that held on better would have stood out.
Price came second. Once buyers tasted separated lots, they began paying a premium for them, as Feran describes. Boram Um, the 2023 World Barista Champion, told Perfect Daily Grind the cup is usually on the acidic side, with citrus, white flowers and a honeyed sweetness.
Reports on yield disagree. Sánchez Valencia describes it as productive. Harmony Coffee, a roaster in York, England, writes that the wide spacing between the nodes on its branches gives it lower yields than other commercial varieties, and that its pink orange color makes ripeness hard to judge, so pickers may need extra passes. Both can be true on different farms.
Most Pink Bourbon still comes from Huila, where it was found. The department sits high in the Andes close to the equator, with cool nights that slow ripening, and our post on Huila coffee covers the region.
What this means for our Colombia
Our medium roast from La Cumbre is Pink Bourbon and Caturra, washed, grown by Rosa Mireles at 1,850 meters. When leaf rust swept through Colombia's farms around 2010, Rosa replanted most of La Cumbre with those two trees. The bag says Pink Bourbon because that is the name the tree has in Huila, and we would rather tell you what the DNA tests found than rename it.
The two trees share the bag, so we cannot tell you which of the notes comes from which. Together they give hints of red cherry, panela, cacao nib. If you want to taste Pink Bourbon on its own, look for a single variety lot from southern Huila and brew it next to ours. Caturra, the other tree in the bag, is a true descendant of Bourbon, and our post on Bourbon and Caturra tells its story.
