What is the Jackson coffee varietal?

Jackson is a Typica-derived cultivar selected on a farm in Mysore, India in the early 20th century - named after Mr. Jackson, on whose estate the plants were found. It's believed to descend from coffee seeds brought from Yemen to India in the 1670s via the Dutch and Portuguese trade routes.

Jackson is a tall-growing Typica-family plant. Its most significant role in the coffee story isn't what it produces in India but what it contributed to East Africa: introduced to Rwanda and Burundi by Belgian colonists, it became part of the foundational genetics of both countries' coffee production alongside Bourbon Mayaguez.

In international specifications, Jackson is rarely named separately - it's more likely to be labelled simply as Bourbon or by lot designation. Its importance is historical: one more thread in the complex web of how Ethiopian genetics reached the rest of the world.