Did you ever play the “telephone game” as a kid? You know, the one where one person chooses something to say and whispers it into their neighbors ear, then they whisper it into the next person’s ear and so on until the last person announces what they’ve heard, and everyone has a laugh at how different it is from the initial statement. Like when we played it here at the roastery and I whispered “I love working at Friedhats, everyone is so nice” and at the end someone loudly proclaimed “Lex picks his nose and eats boogers!” That’s more or less the story of the popular emergence of the pink bourbon variety.
Legend has it that after seeing strange pink cherries on a coffee tree in Colombia, the dispersion of this mysterious variety was traced through various neighboring producers back to its localized origin. At farm zero, nestled amongst “other” bourbons (red, yellow, or just plain old ‘bourbon’), there grew what simply had to be a cross-pollination or a spontaneous mutation in their midst. Due to its distinctive pink cherries, and the bourbon surrounding it, the naming was obvious- this simply was pink bourbon.
Well, this hot new coffee also just happened to cup very well, taking the specialty coffee world by storm on the cupping table, pairing a mysterious origin story with flavor-fueled intrigue. While “hot new person with a mysterious past” is a bit of a trope, it’s a trope for a reason, and we proved to be a sucker for it.
With so much sudden spotlight and speculation flying fast and loose, some responsible folk over at Cafe Imports decided “enough is enough” and ordered genetic testing to be done. In the ultimate “facts don’t care about your feelings” move, they crushed us all with the results– pink bourbon was no bourbon at all. The testing suggested that it was a landrace variety from Ethiopia that had somehow made its way to Colombia. Don’t get me wrong– there’s still a great story there, perhaps one better than the legend that grew in truth’s void, but it doesn’t seem that we’ll ever know it.
If you’re thinking to yourself that the phrasing “the testing suggests” is very loose for scientific terminology, that’s because it kind of is. Or rather, it kind of was. When Cafe Imports first performed the genetic testing, that was the level of certainty given the dataset at the time. However, on their second test a few years later with a more expanded database and a wider set of samples, it became abundantly clear. The samples all came from varying degrees of purity of “pink bourbon”, which was definitively not a bourbon, and absolutely is a relocated Ethiopian landrace variety.
Despite this clear cut lab-confirmed information, the cat was already well out of the bag. It may not genetically be a bourbon, but the name was going to stick. We can’t exactly “The artist formerly known as Prince” it, so the nomenclature pink bourbon is here to stay. Facts may not care about your feelings, but popular opinion certainly does not give a shit about facts.
