Laurina (Bourbon Pointu) Coffee

Laurina, almost always sold under its older French name Bourbon Pointu, is one of the few coffee varieties where “naturally low in caffeine” is a documented genetic fact rather than a marketing line. It is a natural, single-gene recessive mutation of the Bourbon variety, first formally studied by Brazil’s Instituto Agronomico de Campinas in research beginning in the 1930s and published in 1954. A single-bean analysis published in Phytochemistry measured Laurina’s caffeine content at roughly 0.36% to 1.08% by dry weight depending on the plant line tested, against a typical Arabica range of about 1.2% to 1.6%: industry sources commonly round this to “about half.” The same mutation also shrinks the plant and elongates the bean into the tapered, pointed shape that gave the variety its French nickname.

Bourbon Pointu’s story starts on Reunion Island (then Ile Bourbon) in the Indian Ocean, where it appeared on Bourbon-variety trees sometime in the 18th century and was exported to European markets, particularly France, as a refined, digestible luxury coffee. Low caffeine comes at an agronomic cost: the plant is smaller, less productive, and more vulnerable to leaf rust than ordinary Bourbon, and Reunion’s coffee industry collapsed under 20th-century economic pressure from larger producers. By the late 1900s the variety was functionally extinct on the island it was named for. Separate revival efforts beginning in the early 2000s, a Japanese specialty importer tracking down surviving Reunion trees and growers elsewhere finding isolated survivors, brought it back into cultivation, and Reunion’s own La Maison du Laurina now grows and sells it again, alongside newer plantings in Hawaii, Nicaragua, and Colombia.

Hawaii’s Kona coast is where Laurina/Bourbon Pointu currently has its deepest published track record: four separate Coffee Review lots from Hula Daddy, Kona Farm Direct, and Paradise Roasters all score in the mid-90s, consistently landing honey, stone fruit, and floral top notes over a creamy, low-bitterness cup that reviewers repeatedly compare to tea rather than typical Arabica. That delicacy, not just the caffeine number, is the real reason roasters keep a variety this hard to farm in rotation at all.