I haven’t owned an actual alarm clock in ages, but I had one in my room as a child. It was a curious little box with a couple buttons on top. Simple, right? It just tells the time and you can set it to beep when you want to wake up or whatever. Then one day I had this notion that to better understand the alarm clock I needed to take it apart and study it (study what, exactly, I had no idea). With a few screws loosened and some cracking of its plastic enclosure, I discovered what was once so simple became impossibly complicated. Wires! Like, a circuit board or something! I stabbed and prodded and bent. When all was said and done, I realized 1) simple things can become incredibly complicated under scrutiny, and 2) I no longer had a working alarm clock.

And it’s like that with coffee. Such a simple thing, that bean. A toasted seed from nature’s bounty. But as we explore coffee, as with life, complexities are revealed to us and what was once so simple is now more a mystery than when we began. In the following “explainer” I want to examine the subject of variety. If you read until the end, it’s possible you may have more questions than before you started.

C’est la vie.

The Apple Comparison

Forget coffee for a moment, and think about apples. I know it’s bad form to offer two analogies before getting to the subject of an article, but bear with me. What do apples taste like? Apples! Of course, but when you enter the market you can find all sorts of apples. Red Delicious apples, you’ll note, are different than McIntosh apples, which are different than, say, Fuji apples. Each variety of apple brings with it a taste, texture, color and size that may meet our preference at any particular time.

There exists a huge selection of different apples thanks to careful breeding over time. Those Fuji apples? They’re actually a cross-breed of Red Delicious and Ralls Janet apples created in Japan in the 1930s. We can think of coffee in a similar way. There are parent varieties, and then there are cross-bred varieties and even natural mutation varieties that have appeared across the species’ history.

The (Shortest Possible) Explanation of Coffee Varieties

The history of coffee can be traced back to the forests of what is now Ethiopia. In the 1600s, seeds of coffee plants were taken from this area and planted in Yemen, where they were cultivated as crops. These seeds were later identified as the parent varieties of Typica and Bourbon (say this more like burr-BONE and less like the spirit). From Yemen, descendents of Typica and Bourbon plants were spread around the world. Coffee has a colorful history that is intermingled with colonialism and global trade. Such and such country would gift plants to such and such country, or colonial power X would introduce crop Y for cultivation. The offshoots of Typica and Bourbon that circulated the world formed the basis of what we know as modern coffee varieties.

As coffee spread around the world and was seen as a viable agricultural crop, changes began to occur that would affect its DNA. Natural mutations turned Typica and Bourbon plants into new varieties, as did specific cultivation strategies and cross-breeding of plants (including cross-breeding of Typica and Bourbon varieties together). Today, the family tree of coffee includes dozens of genetically identifiable varieties, all of which can be traced to some degree back to the Typica and Bourbon plants.

How coffee varieties change over time, and why, comes down to a number of factors. So to get a sense of how a variety has changed for one specific producing country, let’s take a closer look at Kenya.

Coffee Varieties of Kenya

If you’ve noticed the way varieties are labeled on Kenyan coffees – SL 28 and SL 34, for instance – you may have wondered how these formulaic titles came to be. They were the product of the Scott Agricultural Laboratories that were setup by the British government in the early 1900s to conduct research into coffee production of Kenya’s Department of Agricultural.

The goal of any coffee breeder is to produce a plant that has commercial viability. This includes cup quality, to be sure, but also a host of other factors, such as disease and pest resistance, crop yield and more. Scott Labs had thought that the SL 28 variety would be high-yield and strong. And while the yields were not what they had hoped, this Bourbon-derived variety had a number of other benefits, including exceptional cup quality when grown at medium-high altitudes. (Our latest Kanda is exclusively SL 28 variety.)

Another stand out of the Scott Labs breeding tests was the SL 34 variety. But both the SL 28 and 34 varieties, though promising from a cup quality perspective, were susceptible to coffee-related diseases. This was evident in Kenya in the 1960s as coffee berry disease decimated production. Back at work, the breeders of Kenya, now situated in a laboratory in Ruiru, decided upon the new variety Ruiru 11 in 1985 as a more disease-resistant complement to coffee growing in Kenya.

Kenyan coffee is often seen today as a blend of these varieties – SL 28, SL 34 and Ruiru 11 (predominately, but there are others). The diversity of varieties increases the ability of Kenya’s coffee production to withstand disease, pests, drought and other factors.

What does this mean for you?

In a simplistic way, understanding varieties in coffee helps in understanding taste attributes. The SL 28 variety in Kenya, for example, is known to have an abundance of sweetness, citrusy notes and sparkling acidity. Different varieties, whether we’re talking about coffee or apples, impart similar yet different tastes that we experience.

But it’s not as simple as that. While Red Delicious apples taste different than Pink Lady apples, so do apples from Derek’s farm versus apples from Camille’s. Where they grow matters. How they are grown matters. The soil matters, as does the geography. Hell, the way they’re handled after being picked matters. And with coffee, with such a complex product with numerous factors affecting its cup quality, variety is simply one of many influencers that we can appreciate in our experience. So consider this a resting stop on your coffee journey, and not the ending.