Sweetness first, then jasmine and stone fruit in a washed lot, or cherry, blackberry and red wine in an anaerobic natural. That's Sidra, and its backstory is far less tidy than its cup. The story places it in a research laboratory in Ecuador under circumstances nobody can quite pin down, its genetic identity is still argued over, and the name it carries may not describe a single genotype at all. It has also won the World Barista Championship twice, taken a World Brewers Cup title, and become highly sought after in specialty coffee.
The mystery, it turns out, is part of the story.
Where Sidra comes from, probably
The most widely repeated account puts Sidra in a Nestlé coffee breeding facility in the Pichincha province of Ecuador, sometime in the 1990s. The facility is reported to have been developing hybrids using Ethiopian and Bourbon material, with the aim of combining yield and cup quality. Whether Sidra was a deliberate cross or a selection that caught someone's eye is unclear, and Perfect Daily Grind's reporting is careful to attribute the Nestlé story rather than present it as established fact.
What's better established is who moved it. Don Olger Rogel is credited with introducing both Sidra and Typica Mejorado to the Ecuadorian coffee sector. The facility is reported to have closed, the varieties were never formally released, and the seeds were disseminated among Ecuadorian farms before Sidra became established elsewhere in South America.
La Palma y El Tucán in Cundinamarca was among the first farms to grow Sidra commercially, planting around 1,800 trees in 2012 and adding another 4,300 in 2015 as demand built. In Ecuador, José Pepe Jijón at Finca Soledad in Imbabura has become one of the variety's best-known advocates. In Colombia, the Lasso family at Finca El Diviso in Pitalito, Huila, took it in a different direction, and that's the farm that put Sidra in front of the world.
The genetics problem
The popular version is that Sidra is a cross between Typica and Red Bourbon. Jooyeon Jeon described it that way during her 2019 World Barista Championship routine, and plenty of bags still carry the same description. The story is appealing: Typica's clean sweetness, Bourbon's depth, something better than either.
Genetic testing hasn't backed that story up. Producers and roasters who've sent Sidra samples to research institutions have found material genetically similar to Ethiopian landrace varieties, while other tests have produced different results. There's no single genetic profile that everyone can point to as the definitive Sidra.
World Coffee Research, asked to comment by Perfect Daily Grind, said it was possible that Sidra did not have a clear genetic identity at all, and that different varieties could be circulating under the same name. That's not unusual in coffee, where informal seed systems can allow names to persist without a fixed genetic reference.
A 2026 peer-reviewed study has added another piece. It looked at coffee plants acquired as Sidra at one Ecuadorian farm and confirmed two as compatible with Sidra reference material within the Core Ethiopia genetic group, while another plant sold as Sidra was genetically compatible with Batian, a Kenyan variety. The study is based on a single farm, so it doesn't settle the identity of every plant sold as Sidra, but it shows how messy the commercial label can be.
That's less unusual than it sounds. Names stick through local convention, word of mouth and commercial habit. "Bourbon" covers enormous genetic diversity, and "heirloom" is broader still and isn't a single genetic entity either. Sidra may be a name applied to more than one high-quality coffee genotype, including material that sits within the Core Ethiopia genetic group.
The sensory reputation is more consistent than the paperwork. Intense sweetness, vivid acidity, florals and fruit are all recurring descriptions. Those characteristics overlap with the floral and fruity profiles often associated with Ethiopian coffees, but cup character alone can't establish genetic ancestry.
Sidra's journey: from lab to world stage
Ecuador
Ecuador
Colombia
Boston
Melbourne
WBC 2022, Melbourne: the winning coffee
When Anthony Douglas of Axil Coffee Roasters won the 2022 World Barista Championship in Melbourne, his team had tasted around 100 coffees before settling on an anaerobic natural Sidra from Nestor Lasso's Finca El Diviso in Huila, Colombia. Fermented anaerobically for 80 hours before drying as a natural, the coffee delivered intense cherry, blackberry and red wine characteristics. It was the second time in three years that a Sidra had won the World Barista Championship, and the specialty world took note.
What Sidra tastes like
Sweetness first. Sidra is regularly singled out for unusually high sweetness, and it tends to sit underneath the rest of the cup.
Beyond that, ask three people and you'll get three answers. Cole Torode, who competed with Sidra twice, describes ripe stone fruit, nectarine, apricot and peach, with orange and orange blossom citrus and white grape and wine-like notes. Pepe Jijón has cupped hundreds of Sidra samples at Finca Soledad and looks for something else entirely: botanical and mint. On a table of twenty coffees, he says, that's how his team picks the Sidra out.
In washed lots, the variety often leans floral and tea-like: jasmine, white grape, orange blossom, a silky body and a delicate citrus lift. Push it toward naturals and the fruit can thicken into peach, apricot, nectarine and red berry, riper and more confectionery, with the florals giving way to stone fruit compote. With extended anaerobic fermentation, profiles can move further again, towards cherry, blackberry and red wine, with an acidity that can carry a distinctly tannic structure.
Arturo Arevalo, founder of Selvadentro and formerly of La Palma y El Tucán, argues the variety holds its shape regardless. In his experience Sidra reads sweet whatever you do to it, with honey, malt and red apple, mild citrus acidity and a velvety mouthfeel. Both things seem to be true. The register shifts a long way with processing, and the sweetness doesn't.
The processing factor
Sidra's rise has coincided with the boom in experimental processing, and the pairing makes sense. Where some varieties can become dominated by aggressive fermentation, Sidra's sweetness and fruit give post-harvest work plenty to build on.
Washed Sidra is often the cleanest read on the variety. The cherry is depulped and the remaining mucilage is fermented and then washed away, which can keep the florals distinct and the acidity structured. It's a useful format for seeing differences between origins and farms. Naturals dry with the cherry intact, allowing fermentation and drying to build more fruit weight and body. Peach and nectarine can come further forward, and the finish can lengthen.
Anaerobic naturals can go furthest. Cherries are placed in sealed vessels to limit oxygen during an extended fermentation before drying whole, which is how Néstor Lasso built the coffee that won the 2022 championship: eighty hours anaerobic, then dried as a natural. The intensity can be dramatic when the process is well controlled, and Sidra's sweetness gives it something substantial to work with. Extended anaerobic fermentation has become one of the formats most associated with high-end Sidra.
La Palma y El Tucán have also developed their own approach, which they call the bio innovation method, adding microorganisms native to the farm to the cherry. Those microbes break down sugars and produce more organic acids, which can push tropical fruit notes and a heavier mouthfeel. Honey processing sits somewhere in the middle, keeping more fruit character while retaining a cleaner structure.
Why it's still rare
Two World Barista Championship titles, a World Brewers Cup, and demand from roasters around the world. So why isn't Sidra everywhere?
Because it's a demanding plant. Pepe Jijón puts it plainly: Sidra needs shade, and some say it originally grew in forest. It needs an ecosystem, and it can't be planted in full sun the way commercially minded varieties can. Industry sources commonly place Sidra around 1,650 to 1,800 metres, with the best cup quality often associated with elevations above 1,700. Jijón rates it as high-yielding and resistant to a number of pests and diseases, with one exception: coffee leaf rust, to which it isn't resistant. The team at La Palma y El Tucán add two more, describing it as highly susceptible to Ceratocystis fimbriata and to coffee berry disease.
That makes Sidra hard to scale. The best-known plantings are often specialist operations where growers can manage shade, disease pressure, processing and selective harvesting while finding buyers who value the resulting cup.
El Diviso became a major competition address after Anthony Douglas's 2022 win, and that exposure helped put Sidra in front of a much wider buying audience. Jijón has compared the trajectory with Gesha and points out that it took Panamanian Gesha around thirty years to become the phenomenon it is today.
Ecuador and Colombia, two different conversations
Like Gesha, Sidra can shift meaningfully between origins.
Ecuadorian Sidra often comes across as the more restrained expression in washed lots, particularly in coffees from places such as Imbabura and Loja. Finca Soledad is a useful example: Pepe Jijón grows Sidra biodynamically within a cloud-forest environment, where the farm's 1,515-metre altitude sits below the 1,700-metre figure sometimes cited as ideal for Sidra. The cup can still be delicate, floral and precise, which shows that altitude isn't a hard rule.
Colombian Sidra is particularly prominent in the experimental-processing conversation. Many of the most heavily processed competition lots have come from Huila and Valle del Cauca, with producers such as Néstor Lasso at El Diviso and Café Granja La Esperanza pushing fermentation parameters in very different directions. The result can be more fruit weight, more fermentation complexity and, sometimes, considerably more drama.
Neither is better. They're different conversations with the same name, and the processing, farm and environment are doing plenty of the talking.
The competition trail
Sidra's reputation was built on the competition stage, and the run starts earlier than most accounts have it.
Cole Torode of Rosso Coffee Roasters took a natural Sidra from La Palma y El Tucán to the 2018 World Barista Championship in Amsterdam and placed fifth. He brought the same 2018 harvest back to Boston in 2019, built a routine around the idea of vintage, and placed third. In that same final, Jooyeon Jeon of South Korea won the title using Sidra from La Palma y El Tucán. Two of the top three, one variety, one farm.
In 2022 in Melbourne, Anthony Douglas of Axil Coffee Roasters won with an anaerobic natural Sidra produced by Néstor Lasso at Finca El Diviso in Pitalito, Huila. His team tasted around 100 coffees before settling on it. Lasso had fermented the lot anaerobically for eighty hours before drying it as a natural, and Douglas described the coffee as sweet, articulate and unique. His espresso course landed as blackberry, cherry and red wine, with a long red wine tannin finish.
The following year Sidra won a world title in a different discipline. At the 2023 World Brewers Cup in Athens, Carlos Medina of Chile won the competition using a natural Sidra from Finca Potosí at Café Granja La Esperanza in Valle del Cauca. He chose it as a way to show new varieties and new experiences to Chile's customers. The lot was fermented for 48 hours in tank, dried in silos for another 48, then finished in the sun for eight days.
Sidra has kept turning up on competition stages since. El Diviso, meanwhile, became a competition address in its own right. Jack Simpson used the farm's Ombligon for his espresso course at the 2023 World Barista Championship, then went on to win the 2025 championship using, among other coffees, an anaerobic-natural Papayo from Finca Zarza in Huila.
The broader pattern is familiar: competition exposure can draw attention from roasters and buyers, successful lots can drive demand, and that demand can encourage more producers to experiment with the variety. For Sidra, that cycle is clearly underway.
Quick varietal facts
Varietal: Sidra, also Sydra or Bourbon Sidra
Type: Commercial identity unresolved. Confirmed Sidra material has been placed within the Core Ethiopia genetic group, while genetic testing has also shown that material sold under the Sidra name can belong to other varieties
Origin: Pichincha, Ecuador, reportedly linked to a Nestlé breeding facility in the 1990s; the breeding history has not been formally established
Introduced by: Don Olger Rogel, credited with bringing both Sidra and Typica Mejorado into Ecuador's coffee sector
Growing altitude: Often reported around 1,650 to 1,800m, although successful plantings also occur lower; Finca Soledad is around 1,515m
Growth habit: Tall, up to four metres, with thick trunks, dark green leaves and elongated five-petal flowers. Reported to perform best with shade
Cherry: Red, larger and rounder than typical arabica, with pointed ends, growing densely clustered along the branches
Bean shape: Longer and thinner than many arabica varieties, similar to Gesha
Yield: Reported as high-yielding by Pepe Jijón, although actual performance varies with growing conditions
Disease profile: Not resistant to coffee leaf rust. La Palma y El Tucán also report high susceptibility to Ceratocystis fimbriata and coffee berry disease. Pepe Jijón reports resistance to several other pests and diseases
Key growing regions: Ecuador, particularly Pichincha, Imbabura and Loja, and Colombia, including Cundinamarca, Huila and Valle del Cauca
Typical cup profile: High sweetness, vivid acidity, floral and fruit-forward. Washed lots can show jasmine, citrus and stone fruit; naturals can become fruitier and heavier; extended fermentation can bring cherry, blackberry and wine-like character. Botanical and mint notes are a recognition marker for some cuppers
Notable competition use: 2018 World Barista Championship (Cole Torode, fifth), 2019 World Barista Championship (Jooyeon Jeon, first, and Cole Torode, third), 2022 World Barista Championship (Anthony Douglas, first), 2023 World Brewers Cup (Carlos Medina, first)
Further reading
Perfect Daily Grind, What is Sidra coffee?
A thorough industry overview of Sidra's origin story, genetics, cup profile and growing conditions, with insight from José Pepe Jijón, Cole Torode and Arturo Arevalo, plus commentary from World Coffee Research.
Frontiers in Plant Science, What you plant may not be what you bought
A 2026 peer-reviewed study examining the genetic and morphological identity of coffee plants sold as Sidra and Gesha in Ecuador. It adds new evidence to the ongoing Sidra identity question.
Sweet Maria's Coffee Library, Sidra
A concise entry on the origin story, physical characteristics and the ongoing uncertainty around classification.
Perfect Daily Grind, Ultra-rare coffee varieties: how they rise and fall
How exclusive varieties move through the market, using Sidra, Gesha and Pink Bourbon as cases. Useful for understanding where Sidra sits now.
Perfect Daily Grind, What is Typica Mejorado?
Another coffee linked to the same reported Ecuadorian breeding story as Sidra, and a useful companion piece for understanding the varieties that emerged from Ecuador's informal specialty coffee history.
Want more rare arabica? Read our guides to Geisha, Bourbon, Typica and Papayo.