ABC News Online
May 31, 2007
A coffee grower from Mareeba, in far north Queensland, says she has secured the rights to bring the first naturally caffeine-free coffee trees to Australia.
Currently caffeine has to be removed from coffee beans through a chemical process which affects the taste of the finished product.
Linda Jacques has just returned from Brazil where she met the scientists who discovered caffeine-free plants in Ethiopia.
She says she will be the first to bring the variety to Australia once it is cross-bred with a higher yielding strain and she is sure there will be a market.
"There is a growing demand ... about 10 per cent of the world's coffee production ... they are using decaffeinated coffee at the moment," she said.
----------
Past news item on the discovery
----------
Naturally decaffeinated coffee plant discovered
NewScientist.com news service
Andy Coghlan
June 23, 2004
A naturally decaffeinated coffee plant has been discovered. Coffee from the new strain could be tastier than existing decaf brews, which can lose flavour compounds when caffeine is extracted with solvents.
Other caffeine-free plants have been reported, but the latest comes from the same genetic stock as today’s elite commercial strains. This means the decaffeinated trait should be relatively easy to breed into popular types of coffee.
“This is the first report of a decaffeinated variety of Coffea arabica,” says Paulo Mazzafera, head of the team at the University of Campinas, Brazil, which isolated the strains. “This species is the most cultivated species in the world, responsible for more than 75 per cent of traded coffee,” he says.
The discovery is welcome news for an industry which has struggled to cross elite varieties with more distantly related decaffeinated species.
“So far, caffeine-free natural coffees have been Madagascan species which are outside the mainstream, and not easy to breed from,” says Pablo Dubois, head of operations at the International Coffee Organization, in London, UK.
“This should be a step forward in terms of getting high quality decaffeinated coffee,” says Dubois, not least because extraction of caffeine with solvents would no longer be necessary. “There’s always a risk of losing flavour compounds, although there are examples of very good flavour in today’s decaffeinated products.”
Tree screening
Mazzafera and his colleagues discovered three naturally decaffeinated varieties after screening 3000 Ethiopian coffee trees, representing 300 strains. Experiments on the plants demonstrated that they lacked caffeine synthase, the enzyme in leaves that converts a compound called theobromine into caffeine.
As well as eliminating the need for solvent extraction, the discovery could also be an alternative to decaffeinated plants created by knocking out the gene for the same enzyme via genetic engineering (New Scientist, 18 June 2003). Some consumers are unlikely to accept these.
Mazzafera says that it might be possible to produce commercial decaffeinated coffee directly from the newly discovered strains within five years.
“I haven’t tasted them yet, but in general, C. arabica tastes OK,” he says. Programmes to breed the trait into existing elite strains could take longer, perhaps 15 years, he says.
“It would also provide a way for developing countries to compete with big companies which produce industrially decaffeinated coffee,” says Mazzafera.
Journal reference: Nature (vol 429, p826)
May 31, 2007
A coffee grower from Mareeba, in far north Queensland, says she has secured the rights to bring the first naturally caffeine-free coffee trees to Australia.
Currently caffeine has to be removed from coffee beans through a chemical process which affects the taste of the finished product.
Linda Jacques has just returned from Brazil where she met the scientists who discovered caffeine-free plants in Ethiopia.
She says she will be the first to bring the variety to Australia once it is cross-bred with a higher yielding strain and she is sure there will be a market.
"There is a growing demand ... about 10 per cent of the world's coffee production ... they are using decaffeinated coffee at the moment," she said.
----------
Past news item on the discovery
----------
Naturally decaffeinated coffee plant discovered
NewScientist.com news service
Andy Coghlan
June 23, 2004
A naturally decaffeinated coffee plant has been discovered. Coffee from the new strain could be tastier than existing decaf brews, which can lose flavour compounds when caffeine is extracted with solvents.
Other caffeine-free plants have been reported, but the latest comes from the same genetic stock as today’s elite commercial strains. This means the decaffeinated trait should be relatively easy to breed into popular types of coffee.
“This is the first report of a decaffeinated variety of Coffea arabica,” says Paulo Mazzafera, head of the team at the University of Campinas, Brazil, which isolated the strains. “This species is the most cultivated species in the world, responsible for more than 75 per cent of traded coffee,” he says.
The discovery is welcome news for an industry which has struggled to cross elite varieties with more distantly related decaffeinated species.
“So far, caffeine-free natural coffees have been Madagascan species which are outside the mainstream, and not easy to breed from,” says Pablo Dubois, head of operations at the International Coffee Organization, in London, UK.
“This should be a step forward in terms of getting high quality decaffeinated coffee,” says Dubois, not least because extraction of caffeine with solvents would no longer be necessary. “There’s always a risk of losing flavour compounds, although there are examples of very good flavour in today’s decaffeinated products.”
Tree screening
Mazzafera and his colleagues discovered three naturally decaffeinated varieties after screening 3000 Ethiopian coffee trees, representing 300 strains. Experiments on the plants demonstrated that they lacked caffeine synthase, the enzyme in leaves that converts a compound called theobromine into caffeine.
As well as eliminating the need for solvent extraction, the discovery could also be an alternative to decaffeinated plants created by knocking out the gene for the same enzyme via genetic engineering (New Scientist, 18 June 2003). Some consumers are unlikely to accept these.
Mazzafera says that it might be possible to produce commercial decaffeinated coffee directly from the newly discovered strains within five years.
“I haven’t tasted them yet, but in general, C. arabica tastes OK,” he says. Programmes to breed the trait into existing elite strains could take longer, perhaps 15 years, he says.
“It would also provide a way for developing countries to compete with big companies which produce industrially decaffeinated coffee,” says Mazzafera.
Journal reference: Nature (vol 429, p826)
Comments
Post a Comment
Join the conversation