by another_jim on Sun Jan 25, 2009 3:26 pm
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.