Ollancay
Prodigal

A little over a year ago, Scott Rao of Prodigal tasted three Peru SL-9s that each scored 88+ and presented everything he wanted in a coffee: fruity, delicate, clean, and wonderfully floral. Ollancay has been his third-highest cupping score of 2026 so far. The two higher-scoring coffees were both incredible COE lots.

According to Scott "If there were a 'hot variety of the year' award, SL-9 would win this year."

Valentin selectively hand harvested ripe cherries, then immediately pulped them. After a brief fermentation, the coffee was washed to fully remove any remaining mucilage. The coffee then dried on raised beds for 15-20 days.

The result is a clean, expressive cup with notes of jammy red fruit and intoxicating florals.

A brief look at the SL-9:
If you know your coffee varietals, the "SL" prefix probably rings a specific bell. It stands for Scott Laboratories, the agricultural research station founded in 1903 under British colonial rule in Kenya. Scott Labs is where SL28 and SL34 were born in the 1930s, and those two varieties have gone on to define the cup profile of Kenyan coffee for the best part of a century. Blackcurrant, tomato leaf, that electric acidity. If you've had a great Kenyan, you've probably had an SL.
The numbers tell you that SL9 must have come before SL28. And it did. According to a 1956 bulletin from the Coffee Board of Kenya, SL9 was a single-tree selection from "a block of unknown origin" at Scott Labs. It was considered a shy bearer and hopelessly susceptible to coffee berry disease, so the breeders quietly dropped it. There's a surviving record of one variety trial in Malawi, and that's about it. SL9 was supposed to have disappeared from the story.
Peruvian producers have been growing a distinctive, Gesha-like coffee for years under the local name Inca Gesha. For a long time, everyone assumed it was simply Gesha. The cup profile was uncannily similar, the leaves and morphology looked about right, and the assumption stuck.

Then several buyers started asking the awkward questions. The Brooklyn-based roaster Sey Coffee sent leaf samples to RD2 Vision for DNA fingerprinting. The Peruvian producer Lucio Luque submitted samples to World Coffee Research in the United States. The British roaster Colonna had separate testing carried out in France. And the Tres Cedros farm in Cusco commissioned their own independent analysis.

The results, from multiple labs working with samples from multiple farms, landed in the same place: the trees weren't Gesha. They belonged to a group of Ethiopian legacy varieties that includes SL34, K7 and Mibirizi, and they sat "very close to, and might well be" the Scott Labs SL9 selection itself. The exact genetic fingerprint isn't in any global database, which is why most people writing about these trees use the provisional label "SL9" with an asterisk rather than "SL-09". Close cousins, possibly identical, the records needed to prove it one way or the other long since gone.