Variety record
SL34
The other Scott Laboratories selection - planted beside SL28, sold with it, and carrying the same contested lineage.
Commonly got wrong
Recorded and sold everywhere as French Mission Bourbon, and genetic work places it closer to Typica. It is also more tolerant of rain and lower altitude than SL28, which is why the two are planted together and then sold as one thing.
SL34 is the companion selection to SL28 and it is almost always discussed as a footnote to it.
Two selections, one bag
SL28 and SL34 are routinely interplanted and milled together, then sold as Kenyan AA or AB with no varietal breakdown. That is not concealment, it is how the supply chain works – but it does mean a bag attributed to one of them is usually a blend of both in an unrecorded proportion.
Where they differ agronomically
SL34 tolerates heavier rainfall and performs at lower altitude than SL28, which is why the pair covers more of a farm than either would alone. In the cup it is generally described as fuller and less structured, though a farm-level comparison is rare precisely because they are not separated.
The same contested lineage
SL34 carries the French Mission record – a single tree at Loresho – and the same genetic work that questioned SL28’s Bourbon parentage questioned this one. We record both as contested rather than resolving them, and note that the two claims stand or fall together.
Qualifications on the record
- Parentage
- Selected at Scott Laboratories, Kenya, from a single tree on a farm at Loresho, recorded as French Mission material
- Typical cup
- Recognisably Kenyan but generally less structured than SL28, with more body and less of the blackcurrant intensity.
- What “Declared only” means here
- Nobody has tested it. This is the normal state of almost every coffee sold.
Origins where it is recorded
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Kenya
Where AA means a bean size and nothing else - and where the two most famous selections may not have the lineage their story gives them.