Cultivar

Cultivar is short for “cultivated variety”: a plant type that humans have selected and propagated for desirable traits like flavor, yield, or disease resistance. The term is borrowed from botany, where it has a precise meaning, but in everyday coffee talk it is used more or less interchangeably with varietal and “variety.”

Why it matters: most of the coffee you drink comes from named cultivars chosen by breeders and farmers, not wild plants. Caturra (a compact natural mutation of Bourbon), Catuai, and Pacamara are classic examples of cultivars developed for traits like smaller plant size or bigger beans.

The fine distinction: purists reserve “variety” for naturally occurring types and “cultivar” for human-selected ones, but the line blurs fast, and the arabica world treats them as synonyms. What actually reaches your cup still depends on terroir, altitude, processing, and roast as much as on the cultivar name. For the major coffee types and how they taste, see varietals deep dive.