Liberica is Coffea liberica, a coffee species in its own right, indigenous to upper West Africa and grown today almost entirely in lowland Southeast Asia — above all in the Philippines, where it is called barako. Its seeds average 12.6 mm long, against 9.3 mm for excelsa — which Kew calls Arabica-sized — and it is by a wide margin the smallest of the four crops: Kew’s 2025 assessment puts world production of Liberica and excelsa together at probably less than 1,000 metric tonnes, or about 0.01% of global coffee exports.
That last figure is the single most useful correction on this page, because the number you will see almost everywhere else is wrong, and the people who redrew the species boundaries say so directly.
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The “1 to 2% of the world’s coffee” figure is a century out of date
From the 2025 genomic study of the group, led by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew: “Online sources regularly state that ‘Liberica’ (that is, C. liberica and C. dewevrei) provides 1–2% of the global coffee supply. This is incorrect, as these percentages are based on figures from the late-nineteenth century, when C. liberica stood with Arabica as the second most important coffee of commerce.” The paper continues: “Today, global production of C. liberica and C. dewevrei is probably less than 1,000 metric tons (mt)… an estimate of production of 1,000 mt would represent 0.01% of global coffee exports” (Davis et al., “Genomic data define species delimitation in Liberica coffee”, Nature Plants 11: 1729–1738, 2025).
Liberica was genuinely a major coffee once. It is now a rounding error by volume, and rising interest in it is starting from close to zero.
Liberica and excelsa are two species, not one
The same paper resolved a question that had been open since 2006, when C. excelsa, C. dewevrei and C. dybowskii were all folded into Coffea liberica. Sequencing 353 nuclear genes across 55 samples, the authors conclude: “Genomic and other datasets support the division of Coffea liberica into three species: C. liberica, C. dewevrei (excelsa) and C. klainei.” That took the number of known Coffea species from 131 to 133.
Two consequences worth carrying:
- Excelsa is a separate species, and its correct name is Coffea dewevrei, not C. excelsa. It is Central African, not West African, and it is farmed at higher elevations than Liberica. Our page on excelsa coffee beans covers it properly; this page does not repeat it.
- Liberica’s indigenous range is narrower than the reference works say. The study found C. liberica occurs naturally in “upper West Africa (Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana and Nigeria)” — five countries, where the current IUCN Red List assessment reports seventeen.
How big the seed actually is
Kew measured it. C. liberica seeds run 9.5–18.3 × 6.5–12 mm, with mean values of 12.6 × 8.4 mm; the fruit is 1.8–3.4 × 1.7–3.3 cm. For comparison within the same table, C. dewevrei seeds average 9.3 × 6.6 mm and are described as “similar in size and shape to Arabica”.
So Liberica’s seed is roughly a third longer than an arabica-sized seed on average — big, and noticeably so in the hand, but not the “almost double the size” with “an average length of around 2 centimeters” that this page used to claim. Two centimeters is above the top of Kew’s measured range.
The size has consequences beyond looks. Liberica’s parchment averages 0.57 mm thick against excelsa’s 0.31 mm, and its pulp 4–9.5 mm against 2–3.5 mm — which is why the study describes excelsa as having the higher outturn, “the conversion ratio of fresh fruit to clean (unroasted) coffee”. More of a Liberica cherry is fruit you have to throw away.
Barako: how a West African tree became a Batangas institution
Coffee reached the Philippines long before Liberica did. Ukers’s 1922 trade history records that “Spanish missionaries from Mexico are said to have carried the coffee plant to the Philippine Islands in the latter part of the eighteenth century. At first it was cultivated in the province of La Laguna; but afterward other provinces, notably Batangas and Cavite, took it up” — and is explicit about which coffee that was: “The coffee was of the arabica variety” (Ukers, All About Coffee).
Liberica arrived much later. Davis and colleagues date Southeast Asian Liberica consumption to “its introduction in the late-nineteenth century”, which is the same window in which the Philippine arabica industry collapsed. Ukers gives the collapse in numbers: annual exports of 16,000,000 pounds in 1883 and 1884, then “the leaf blight appeared on the island about 1889, causing destruction from which there has not yet been complete recovery. The export of 3,086 pounds in 1917 shows the depths into which the industry had fallen.”
Slow Food’s Ark of Taste, which lists barako as an endangered food, records the name and the decline: barako “takes its name from the Tagalog word for ‘wild boar’ (barako), who are fond of dining on the plant’s leaves and berries”; the trees “grow up to 20 meters tall” and “produce larger cherries than those found on Coffea arabica trees”; and the bean shape is unlike the others — “One side is lower than the other side, creating a distinctive point or hook at the bottom. The furrow in the middle is generally jagged rather than straight as in other coffee species” (Slow Food Foundation, Barako Coffee).
Slow Food also gives the reason it is disappearing, and it is economic rather than sentimental: “Because the plant is larger than other coffee varieties, it requires more land to produce the same amount of coffee. Therefore, many farmers have switched to planting robusta (Coffea canephora)”. Barako today accounts for “less than 1% of commercial coffee grown”, and much of it is drunk locally rather than exported. In Batangas it is also used as an alternative to soup (sabaw) alongside a dry or fried dish, which is not how most of the world treats coffee.
One conflict worth flagging rather than smoothing over: the Slow Food entry says barako was “first planted in Batangas, Luzon, Philippines by Spanish friars in the 18th century”. That cannot be right for C. liberica specifically, since the species did not reach Southeast Asia until the late nineteenth century on Kew’s account. The eighteenth-century planting was coffee in Batangas; it was not this species.
Malaysia, and where else it grows
Malaysia is the other Liberica country, and it has been for a long time. Ukers, writing about the Federated Malay States a century ago: “Liberica is mostly favored, and is grown with some success as an inter-crop with cocoanuts and rubber. The robusta variety has also been introduced, but does not seem to do as well as the liberica.” Kew’s 2025 paper describes the present tense of the same story: in Southeast Asia, Liberica “is now witnessing a renaissance, particularly in Malaysia, Indonesia and Fiji.”
The growing conditions in the paper are specific, and they replace a set of numbers this page previously printed without a source. In cultivation, Liberica sits “at low elevations (10–500 m), in warm to hot (for example, a mean annual temperature of 24–27 °C) and wet (for example, mean annual precipitation of 2,000–4,000 mm) habitats, with low precipitation seasonality (short or indistinct wet season(s)), such as those in lowland regions of Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia.”
Two of the old figures were simply wrong against that. The page gave rainfall as “around 1500 to 2000 millimeters per year” — the sourced range starts where the old one stopped. And it said the harvest “generally falls between December and March”, where the study reports that cultivated C. liberica in tropical Central Africa, Peninsular Malaysia, Sarawak and Java “flowers and fruits throughout the year”, in contrast with C. dewevrei, which does have distinct seasons.
It may be closer to threatened than anyone realised
Redrawing the species boundary shrank the wild plant dramatically. Under the revised circumscription, the extent of occurrence for C. liberica “decreases from 6,812,900 km2, as per the existing International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List assessment, to 352,310 km2, which represents a reduction of 94.8%”, with the “area of occurrence (AOO)” falling from 736 km2 to 52 km2. The authors’ conclusion is that C. liberica “may warrant reassessment as a species threatened with extinction, shifting from its current classification of ‘Least Concern’ to ‘vulnerable'”. They add that the same is not true of excelsa, which “falls into the ‘Least Concern’ category”.
They are careful about what those metrics rest on — historical herbarium records, “mainly from 1900–1980” — and they note that targeted searches at Kasewe Hills Forest Reserve in Sierra Leone in 2023 and 2024 failed to find it at all, the last record there being a specimen from 1913. The wild species and the farmed crop are in very different situations, and the farmed one is not what is at risk.
What has been removed from this page, and why
- The tasting notes. “a bold, full-bodied taste with hints of smokiness”, “fruity, floral, woody, and earthy undertones”, an aroma “reminiscent of dark chocolate, spices, and even floral notes” — nobody at this site has cupped Liberica, and those descriptors were written as though somebody had. They are gone. Kew’s paper says only that “Liberica and excelsa have contrasting coffee flavour profiles”, which supports the market treating them separately and supports nothing more specific.
- The caffeine rating. A comparison table rated Liberica’s caffeine as “moderate to high” against arabica and robusta. The Kew study reports no caffeine figures for the Liberica group, and we could not source published figures for C. liberica elsewhere. Rather than borrow a number from a different species, this page states that we could not source a caffeine figure for Liberica.
- The rust story. The page said the Philippines “shifted its focus to Liberica coffee production, which proved to be more resistant to the disease”. The historical record we opened describes an industry that was destroyed rather than redirected, and none of our sources describes C. liberica as resistant to coffee leaf rust. The claim has been removed.
- The grind advice. “Due to the larger size of Liberica coffee beans, a coarser grind is generally recommended” does not follow — grind size is set at the grinder and by the brew method, not by how big the bean was before it went in. Removed.
- A health-benefits section listing vitamins, minerals, antioxidant and metabolic effects with no citation for any of it, and a sustainability section of generalities about fair trade and social responsibility that said nothing specific to Liberica. Both deleted. For what certifications actually commit a buyer to, see fair trade versus organic coffee.
- Three hot-linked stock images served from Pixabay and Unsplash, one of them a photograph of a woman walking on a path attached to the health section. They were not of Liberica.
- A Wikipedia link as the species citation. Replaced with the Nature Plants paper, which is where the current species concept comes from.
Buying and brewing it
Liberica is a small, mostly locally consumed crop, so the useful things on a bag are a roast date, a named origin — Batangas or Cavite in the Philippines, or a Malaysian estate — and a processing method. Expect the beans to look wrong next to arabica: bigger, uneven, with the hooked shoulder and jagged centre cut that Slow Food describes. That is the species, not a defect.
Start filter brewing at 55 g of coffee per 1 litre of water — about 1:18 by weight, the standard brew ratio in SCA Standard 310-2021, Home Coffee Brewers, §7.1.5: “The standard brew ratio of 55 g of coffee per 1.000 kg of 17±3°C water”. Stronger means more coffee, not less water, and a coffee “cup” is 6 fl oz rather than 8. For brew temperature see our page on the best temperature for French press coffee, and for how much of a coffee’s character survives the roaster, roast levels.
The other commercial coffees
- Arabica — Coffea arabica, and the named varieties on a specialty bag.
- Robusta — Coffea canephora, the species Batangas farmers have been replanting with.
- Excelsa — Coffea dewevrei, Liberica’s newly separated relative.
And for the botany behind the word “bean” in all of the above, see are coffee beans legumes.
