Please forgive me if this has already been posted (I did search the forums before posting). To me this is an interesting effort as my wife only drinks decaf and I don't drink regular coffee in the evenings (yet, as my coffee habit is evolving partly due to frequenting this terrific site). Of course, the coffee company's primary reason for trying to make this happen is the potential for greater profit ("If you have lower-caffeine content with higher pleasure, you might be able to repeat your little luxury several times a day," Mr. Illy says.) As a capitalist, I don't have any problem with that, and the market will appropriately reward or punish the effort. I would expect to see advertising extolling the virtues of 'healthier, low-caffeine coffee' trying to jump on the 'healthy lifestyle' bandwagon. It will be fun to watch, but I don't plan on spending $300/lb!


http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122669958787129493.html

Juliet Chung wrote:From Madagascar to Costa Rica, farmers, scientists and multinational companies have been racing to deliver an elusive product -- a gourmet coffee bean that's naturally low in caffeine.

Coffee companies have been spending millions of dollars identifying, breeding and, in some cases, genetically manipulating promising coffee varietals. They've rooted through seed banks, assembled teams of agronomists and tasted countless cups of coffee, all in pursuit of what some people call the industry's holy grail, a bean that produces a great-tasting cup of "low-caf."

(cont'd)

As a geneticist though one who works with mammals and not plants I still have a few thoughts on this topic. I have only skimmed the article so far but I don't see why modified beans should be much more expensive and I don't understand why they can't make them 100% decafe by knocking out a critical enzyme in the pathway. Seems like they have a ways to go to understand the process fully.

I view the current state of decaffeination as a "transient process". You pick out an appropriate or desired crop of beans and put it through a chemical treatment that removes much but not all of the caffeine and in addition causes other somewhat undefined changes to the beans. The end result must be repeated with each crop or bean choice and the end result will vary somewhat too. The good side of this is that you can decaffeinate any bean you desire from any crop. The bad side is that it is not 100% efficient and the process alters the end taste to the point where some of us don't go near decafe beans.

Through genetics either using recombinant DNA technology or via traditional genetic crosses one can select for (I presume not being a plant expert) mutants or knockouts of genes that are part of the pathway that makes caffeine. This process is stable rather then "transient" as described above. You can get the same beans crop after crop and year to year. Recombinant techniques are to me more desirable since they maintain virtually "congenic" or identical overall genetic backgrounds with the coffee strain you choose to make decaffeinated. That would lead to virtually identical tastes given the beans are planted in soils and altitudes where the "terroir" allows this to take place. I can't address any cross pollination or strain contamination problems but they would not be any different then any other coffee plant cross contamination taking place "naturally." The downside of this protocol is that you have only the very limited number of strains that are modified as opposed to a chemical process that can be used on any beans. I don't know if the coffee genome has been sequenced or if the caffeine biosynthetic pathway is fully deciphered. I guess I have some homework to do.

The bottom line to my thoughts is that a genetic approach COULD in theory allow the highest quality beans to be decaffeinated in a stable fashion while maintaining the quality of the coffee. Who among us would not like 20 great shots in a row

GMO crops tend to elicit everything from suspicion to outright paranoia, especially in Europe. Also, coffee pollen is wind carried, so farmers tend to be worried about what is being planted upwind of them. So the people doing non-caf coffee are following conventional breeding techniques.

These are also suspect in my book. Right now, the best tasting coffees are coming from old, genetically diverse cultivars -- Ethiopian coffees, old growth SL28s, Bourbons, and Typicas in the rest of East Africa and Central America, or from accidental hybrids like Pacamaras. The highly selected strains may have better yields and resistance, but even the best ones, like Caturas, are one dimensional in taste and rarely win prizes or score of 90. Caturra is the overwhelming specialty coffee variety in Central America; but all the auction money goes to far less common Bourbons, Pacamaras, and Geishas, since Caturras mostly taste clean, snappy, and completely and boringly cookie cutter.

I'm not arguing against science in high end coffees; I'm just pointing out that the priorities for any top tier food is radically different from the quality control, precision, and perfectly canned experience Andrea Illy is droning on about (he really doesn't seem to be a chip off the old block). Fine foods require lots of unique qualities rather than uniform quality control. This change of emphasis makes the excessive genetic uniformity produced by modern breeding methods a poor marketing strategy. If the new non-caf coffees turn out to be cookie cutter in taste, nobody is going to pay more than cookie cutter prices once their novelty wears off. The people willing to spend $50 or more a pound for coffee will not buy them more than once.

Thanks for that Jim

I don't understand the hysteria regarding genetically modified food products but I have no stake one way or the other besides thinking that feeding the growing population on the planet should be a priority.

With regard to coffee and pollination I would assume then that there is a constant cross-pollination "problem" with common strains inter-breeding and messing with the more prized varieties. Why no complaining about this natural process?

I understand from the wine industry that older vines as you describe can be used to then splice on newer shoots that make the fruit/grape. I know its very labor intensive and therefore likely expensive but can this chimera production be done with coffee?

You have described a complicated problem with no easy solutions. I certainly don't have any great ideas to bring to the table. However, all these new possibilities are pretty exciting to me anyway.

GC7 wrote:I don't understand the hysteria regarding genetically modified food products but I have no stake one way or the other besides thinking that feeding the growing population on the planet should be a priority.

I don't understand it either; mostly ignorance I guess, plus the disappearance of good will towards new Promethian technologies stemming from the failed promises of atomic energy and assorted environmental crises.

It's a pity. The problem of disappearing genetic diversity in agricultural strains, that has geneticists as worried as gourmets, can be solved with gene splicing. Instead of breeding ultra-uniform strains with the desirable traits, new alleles for these traits can be introduced into a much more diverse gene pools.

This could be a nice one for a poll. "Would you buy genetically modified, low-caffeine coffee". Count me in as a "Yes!".

another_jim wrote:It's a pity. The problem of disappearing genetic diversity in agricultural strains, that has geneticists as worried as gourmets, can be solved with gene splicing. Instead of breeding ultra-uniform strains with the desirable traits, new alleles for these traits can be introduced into a much more diverse gene pools.

Well said Jim - You have hit on a real dilemma where disappearing diversity by over use of a few strains that may not be capable in the long run of sustaining itself in all environmental niches could cause the loss of a few billion years of natural selection. The answer is as you say but only along with a sustained and concerted effort to maintain every possible strain in storage or otherwise before they go extinct. In the future if we don't implode and also turn our back on science and technology as we have done somewhat in the last decade we will be able to mix and match traits at will but only if those genes have been saved and stored away. It's a VERY important effort.

Elbasso wrote:This could be a nice one for a poll. "Would you buy genetically modified, low-caffeine coffee". Count me in as a "Yes!".

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.

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.

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

GC7 wrote: Who among us would not like 20 great shots in a row

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.

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 CAFFINE). 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

Welcome Mark, and thanks for the nice detective work.

The claim by Daterra that Opus is a natural Arabica fits into the standard legend of coffee cultivars -- that great coffees are natural mutations (Bourbon, Catura), hybrids (Pacamara), or unclassifiable discoveries (Geisha) , whereas the bred cultivars, especially those crossed to non-arabicas, are second rate (Catimor, Novo Mundo, Timor, etc). In actual fact, very few coffees fit their legends, and almost all coffee trees now in use are a product of a lot of selective breeding. The real trick is that the selection retains a large emphasis on cup quality, and not just yield, hardiness, and resistance.

These origin legends are not so much marketing, since most coffee drinkers couldn't care less, but because coffee professionals are mostly hopeless romantics.

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.