Just how many things can affect how your coffee will taste? Let us count the ways: terroir (qualities of the land/soil), farm elevation, processing techniques, when and how the coffee is picked,  roasting, brewing, and, yes, the actual variety of the coffee plant. (And probably, like, a million more things!)

We don’t want to get too in the botanist-like weeds here, but with the release of two different varieties of coffee from the same farm, we thought it was apropos to at least ‘dig’ into the proverbial coffee soil and pull up some ‘dirt’ on coffee varietals. If you do want to ‘sow’ up some serious coffee plant and variety knowledge, World Coffee Research has an extensive coffee variety catalog where you can ‘plant’ yourself for however long you want.

Our goal for this post isn’t to go through every single variety of coffee and tell you characteristics of each (mostly because that would probably be more of a textbook than a blog post on a coffee website), but to present another facet of the beautiful, and sometimes dizzying, complexity of coffee.

Too often we forget that coffee or coffea arabica, by its scientific name, like most other plants has dozens (or hundreds, possibly thousands with all of the heirloom varieties that grow wild in Ethiopia) of different varieties that all have their own set of characteristics. One of the most common ways to wrap your brain around this is thinking about the different kinds of apples — a granny smith looks and tastes different from a red delicious or honeycrisp and so on. The same is true for each variety of coffee cherry/plant.

As the final consumer of the coffee, we don’t really encounter many of these characteristics because, chances are, we aren’t seeing the coffee in its plant form. And, because there’s so many other things affecting how the coffee tastes (remember that list at the beginning?), the type of coffee plant that produced your coffee typically isn’t one of the main flavor contributors we think about.

We just released two fantastic coffees from Don Higinio’s farm in Guatemala — Las Moritas. We thought this was the perfect opportunity to show just how much the coffee variety can affect the flavor of the final cup. The only difference in these two coffees is the variety — red pacamara and yellow caturra — but they taste worlds apart.