Artwork to come
The Port of Long Beach, gantry cranes against the morning
Brief · A vintage mid-century travel postcard illustration. Style: printed like cheap vintage four-colour lithography, with a COARSE VISIBLE HALFTONE DOT SCREEN across the entire image — especially sky and water. Fine stipple and engraved tonal detail underneath the screen, but no bold black outlines, no woodcut, no comic ink, no photorealism, no 3D, no gloss, no digital gradients. Palette: warm cream-sand #f0d8c0 plus one blue — dusty teal #90c0c0 and slate #607878 when sun-bleached, saturated cyan #30c0d8 when vivid. Muted olive greens in foliage. Composition: the subject sits in the RIGHT THIRD; the left two-thirds is nearly empty sky, water or ground. Low horizon. No people, or figures so small they are marks. Scene: the Port of Long Beach at first light — a row of enormous gantry cranes in silhouette, stacked containers receding, a bulk carrier at berth, flat still water in the foreground. Mood: industrial, effective, entirely unromantic, quietly magnificent. Optional single small red accent: one container. No text, no lettering, no signage anywhere. 3:2 landscape, full bleed.
Catimor
Portugal · 1959 · Timor hybrid × Caturra
“The Port of Long Beach. Unromantic, and holding the whole thing up.”
Why this place
The Port of Long Beach at first light is enormous, industrial and almost entirely unloved. Gantry cranes in silhouette, containers stacked six high, a bulk carrier at berth. Nobody puts it on a postcard, and if it stopped for a fortnight the country would notice within days.
Catimor is the port. It is a Timor hybrid — arabica crossed with robusta, found on Timor in the 1920s — put onto Caturra in Portugal in 1959, and it is where most of the world’s leaf-rust resistance comes from. When rust swept Central America in 2012 and took out something like half the crop, Catimor lines are a large part of why there is still an industry.
For which it gets no thanks whatsoever.
- In the cup
- Variable, and that is the honest answer. At altitude it can be clean and sweet; low down it turns woody and blunt
- Lineage
- Timor hybrid (an arabica × robusta cross) onto Caturra — where rust resistance comes from
- Grown
- Everywhere that leaf rust arrived, which is nearly everywhere
- Altitude
- 600–1,400 m
- Brew it as
- Espresso and blends. Judge the lot, not the variety
Our opinion
Judge the lot, not the variety. Catimor has a reputation for tasting woody and blunt, and at low altitude it frequently does. Grown high and processed with care it can be clean, sweet and completely respectable, and a good deal of specialty coffee sold without a varietal on the bag is exactly this.
The robusta in its ancestry is real and shows up as a certain heaviness, which is why it works better in espresso and blends than as a delicate single origin.
The snobbery about it is mostly inherited rather than tasted. If a coffee in front of you is good, it is good — the pedigree is not the drink.
Sources
Out past the break
The Hybrid Set
More from The Hybrid Set