DavidMLewis wrote:Maybe, maybe not. I just want to point out that there's likely to be a reason that the plants evolved caffeine, probably having to do with pest resistance. It's certainly possible that if you knocked out the gene that coded for caffeine, you'd have to use very high levels of pesticide or have other agricultural consequences.

Best,
David

There are a few well defined genetic modifications using recombinant technologies that can alter requirements for water, salt and other growth altering traits including resistance to pesticides and herbicides such as roundup.

I'm not really trying to take a stand one way or the other with regard to coffee, however, I would strongly argue that we can and should use all necessary technologies for food crops like rice, corn, milk and other staples of our diet that could help to feed the worlds population safely and effectively. We also need to at the same time preserve genetic diversity for future generations and allow farmers in poor areas to be less dependent on huge agri-business profit making machines. It's a tough problem but one I'm convinced can be solved if we can get around the greed issue us humans tend to face all the time.

ManSeekingCoffee wrote:I'm inclined to agree with you seeing as how too much caffeine turns me into a wigged out mess, but just to play devil's advocate, does caffeine make good coffee all the better by increasing its scarcity at any given moment? In other words, if you could drink 20 cups of the stuff, would you like it as much? More isn't always better.

OK - I agree but I was grandstanding a bit for effect.

I really hope they get some success with this.

I used to down caffeine like there was no tomorrow, but later in life started getting migraines when I had caffeine. I even forgot it had caffeine, and ordered a tiramisu recently. Like clockwork, 8 hours or so later I started going blind in my left visual field.

Anyway, I love coffee but have tried to get rid of any caffeine in my diet. I am often disappointed by how bad even relatively expensive decaf coffee beans taste.

I don't think the 50% caffeine ones would be low enough for me, but I'm crossing my fingers over the genetically modified ones.

On the business model side, If genetically altered/engineered coffee follows the same model as other crops, you wind up with a situation where Monstanto owns all the altered coffee plants. The main difference is coffee doesn't have to be planted every year, so once you got you bushes established the patent holder would be out of the loop. However it could make it illegal for a farmer to plant or sell the berries, for purposes other than roasting.

Last year I bought and roasted some Daterra Opus 1 Exotic lower caffeine green beans. It claims to be about 30% less caffeine than regular...less than 1% caffeine. It took them 12 yrs to get to that point.

I -felt- the caffeine in it more than I do with regular decaf beans.

the reason you feel more caffeine in the opus is because there is in fact more. much more than in decaffeinated coffee. some of their marketing is a bit misleading. yes it has less than 1% caffeine. but this is by weight in the green bean. which is only a reduction in caffeine of around 30%. whereas commercial decaffeination methods remove considerably more. most arabica is around 1%-1.5% caffeine weight with some cultivars having as low as 0.7% here is just one study showing natural variation. http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S1415-47572000000100036&script=sci_arttext&tlng=en

there are many cultivars already known that have levels of caffeine close to half that of the most common arabica varietals. these present opportunity in themselves but are not commercially planted anywhere because of the less than desirable yields. interestingly i came across a paper once that showed the caffeine content of geisha as being slightly less than that of other cultivars. given caffeine is a bitter substance from a taste perspective low caffeine could potentially improve tastes in some ways although i have also come across papers that show these low caffeine types have higher concentrations of the similarly bitter trigonoline. although with GM you could potentially eliminate both. there are caffeine free species of coffee in Madagascar and i suspect careful study of them has already been done and some of the hows of creating GM decaf coffee are already figured out.

Hi All-

I found this thread by chance. I don't roast. I own a Cuisinart. But I have been researching the coffee species C. racemosa. This is Daterra's Opus 1 story (http://www.zingermanscoffee.com/2008/01/07/homage-to-opus-a-long-slow-cup/):

"The Opus story is a very crazy one," Luis related during a visit last month. "Back in 1954 Madagascar sent some samples of new coffee plant genetics to Ethiopia. In 1964, this plant, racemosa, which never hybrids with Arabica, was then sent from Ethiopia to Brazil [where] they had to be in quarantine for two or three months to make sure there was no new disease. They were all together in one small plantation but one plant in the nursery cross-fertilized with Arabica. One researcher saw this plant was different and he checked and he saw that it had more chromosomes. That one single plant was crossed with the Bourbon coffee that is grown in Brazil. And that plant became aramosa (as in "Arabica" + "Racemosa"), then later it came to be called guarani for the Indian tribe Tupy-Guarani.

From what I have been reading in papers, this is not completely true. Coffea racemosa was intentionally crossed with C. arabica for many reasons (cold tolerance, disease resistance & LOW CAFFEINE). But it was done by researchers, not some natural beautiful random cross. There has been no GM, just good breeding. More than likely the initial cross mentioned above was not a natural cross, but the discovery of a polyploid C. racemosa. This plant was then crossed with the natural polyploid C. arabica (2n=4x=44 chromosomes) to start the Opus 1 breeding process. Opus 1 and most C. racemosa / C. arabica hybrids will be a completely natural low caffeinated coffee. No fish genes. No people genes. Just Coffea sp. genes.

But what I want to know is why they are calling it "the first 100% Arabica coffee grown to be naturally lower in caffeine" if it is >50% C. arabica and <50% C. racemosa? This makes it sound fishy.

Mark
Seattle, WA

GC7 wrote:I think you could modify your poll to say -"Would you buy low or no caffeine Panama Geisha COE winner or Ethiopia Idido Misty Valley no cafeine or insert your very favorite coffee here? Those are or will be possible through genetic techniques.

Actually, we had a customer complain that although they loved Esmeralda, they weren't getting their usual caffeine buzz with it. So we had Rachel at hacienda la esmeralda get the coffee analyzed and the results came back with an average .9% caffeine content. Further tests would have to be done to see if Geisha is consistently at this level, but my understanding is that this is still within the range of what arabica normally is. I would guess the larger problem is getting a consistent gene pool to yield a crop of any significant size with low caffeine content since coffea hybridizes quite often.