Kent

Kent is a selection made from Typica (and related Bourbon influenced) trees on the Doddengooda Estate in Mysore, India, in the early 1920s, at a time when coffee leaf rust was devastating plantations across Asia. Growers and researchers selected trees that showed useful tolerance to rust, and the resulting Kent variety became one of the first commercially recognised rust tolerant Arabica cultivars anywhere in the world. Kent spread through India and to parts of East Africa and Latin America on the strength of that early resistance, and it fed into later breeding work behind varieties such as S795. Over the following decades new races of leaf rust overcame its resistance, so it is no longer considered rust tolerant by modern standards, but it retains a reputation for a clean, classic Typica-like cup.