Artwork to come
The Inland Empire in October, when the wind turns around
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: a wide Inland Empire valley under a hard, dry Santa Ana wind — eucalyptus and palms bent hard to one side, dust lifting off the road, San Gorgonio sharp and cloudless on the horizon, powerlines running to the vanishing point. Mood: dry, electric, high-contrast, nothing soft anywhere. Optional single small red accent: a single roadside flag or windsock, rigid in the wind. No text, no lettering, no signage anywhere. 3:2 landscape, full bleed.
SL28
Kenya · 1930s · Scott Agricultural Laboratories, Nairobi
also SL34 is its sibling
“Tastes like the Santa Ana winds.”
Why this place
The Santa Anas arrive from the wrong direction. Instead of the cool damp coming off the Pacific, the air comes down out of the high desert, warms as it drops, and turns the whole basin dry, clear and slightly electric. Everybody sleeps badly. The mountains look about six miles closer than they are.
SL28 is that. There is no softness in it and no marine layer to hide behind. The acidity is enormous — blackcurrant, sharp tomato leaf, grapefruit pith — and it arrives with the same nervous, high-contrast clarity as an October morning when the wind has turned around.
It is also, like the wind, drought-hardy and slightly unruly. Scott Laboratories in Nairobi selected it in the 1930s from drought-resistant stock, which is why it survives where finer things wilt.
- In the cup
- Blackcurrant, tomato leaf, grapefruit. Enormous acidity with real structure under it
- Lineage
- A Scott Laboratories selection from Tanganyika Drought Resistant stock
- Grown
- Kenya, and increasingly Colombia and Panama
- Altitude
- 1,400–2,000 m
- Brew it as
- Filter. V60 at 60 g/L. Never espresso
Our opinion
Filter. Always filter. People pull SL28 as espresso to show off the acidity and it comes out like a fruit squash that has been shouted at. The structure that makes it magnificent through a V60 becomes an argument under nine bars.
It is also the variety most often ruined by roasting. Taken too light it is aggressively sour and people call it “bright” to be polite. Taken too dark you have paid a Kenyan premium for something that tastes like a decent Brazil. The window is narrow and a good roaster hits it.
Worth the money, and worth learning to brew properly before you buy the expensive lot. Start with 60 g/L and a medium-fine grind and do not fiddle.
Sources
Out past the break
The Kenyan Set
More from The Kenyan Set