Coffea stenophylla: A forgotten bean that could save coffee from extinction

As the article states, the taste is complex beyond our understanding.

"When it comes to taste, coffee is amazingly complex. A single cup may contain up to 1,200 volatile compounds. Yet what you perceive in a cup depends on many things besides the plant’s genome: the environment in which it grew, the weather, the roast, the water used for brewing. Even the color of the cup matters. White makes coffee seem more intense, while clear glass makes it seem sweeter."

Yeah, pretty much. I drink tea from time to time, but I still prefer coffee. I don't know, feels more earthy or fuller? I also like the smell better.

I agree. You can get your caffeine boost from a pill if that floats your boat. I too love coffee and for a variety of reasons. I was only mentioning that there is a native plant that produces caffeine and has a pleasant taste so that it could serve as a caffeine (or tea) substitute in the event that supplies of real coffee became unreliable for any reason.

I drink lots of coffee and various teas.

I agree that there is no likelihood that coffee snobs are gonna jump to yaupon tea. I mentioned this really just to point out that there is a native plant here in North America that produces caffeine so if one day we wake up and supplies of the real beans are short or interrupted for long periods we will have something totally free to brew up for a caffeine hit. If you're out camping in an area where yaupon grows wild you can always grab a few leaves, wash them and dry them until they're brown, crush them and boil some tea water. No need for a late night cup of coffee that could keep you too wired to rest when you can enjoy a simple cup of yaupon tea that won't leave you wired.

I drink a lot of coffee too. I enjoy the flavor and hanging around without a cup of coffee feels strange. Sometimes I just add some boiling water to the dust in the coffee cup, stir it up and see what happens. I've certainly had worse at more gas stations than I care to remember.

I enjoy checking all the native plants growing on my place. I discovered another yesterday that I would love to eradicate since it really takes over quickly.

It's in the geranium family Geraniaceae, and is one of the most ancient cultivated plants around. Its use was so common that it has spread from the Mediterranean area where it is native to most every other inhabited place. People ate it and fed it to their animals and it was used as a medicine so they had multiple reasons to carry some with them as they migrated across the landscape.

Redstem Stork's Bill [0]https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/47687-Erodium-cicutarium

Supposed to taste like a parsley. I ate some yesterday and agree that it is close to parsley with a slightly more sharp flavor if you just eat the leaves and stems. I tried some of the seed pods and that was a no-go. They would need to be cooked to be edible since they are hard and fibrous raw. I haven't tried the root yet.

It's unlikely that I will ever eat my way out of this invasive infestation but I will add some to the salad to see whether my wife notices.

Can you rebrand a species? Drinking vomitoria sounds less than appetizing.

I can see the guy now as the realization that this native plant could undermine the British East India tea trade if people came to enjoy yaupon tea. It probably didn't take any convincing to get him to assign such an uninviting name to the plant and in doing so, save one of the British Empire's main trade items.

It was definitely a chickenshit move on his part though.

> It's clear that the health advice banning coffee is a remnant of earlier times and currently operates as a shibboleth and token of obedience without merit.

How is what you're describing any different than most tenants of faith-based institutions?

It was given as a revelation from God[1]. This is not some doctrine that came about from a philospher. It came from the top.

The same revelation discouraged tobacco use, the problems of which wasn't understood until much later. I assume the same will happen with caffeine, tannins, and other coffee/tea things.

1: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-test...

Just moved to Utah (wife's job was relocated here) a couple of years ago after many decades in the southeast and midwest. Some stuff grows like crazy here, some stuff doesn't.

Nothing in the continental US competes with the gulf coast when it comes to sheer masses of flowering vegetation. Everything is green and most of it flowers. Everywhere you look, there's actually really neat and beautiful plants. But most of it is what folks think of as "weeds". Non native stuff in yards (what people think of as "flowers") often struggles. E.g. yapon is native and is often an ornamental and it'll grow like crazy, or even worse, try planting some Mexican petunias... I love those things, but they are a purple swarm that will swallow everything.

But plant your daffodils, and while they'll grow, they get overpowered and outspread by everything native. A lot of common ornamentals can't take the fully saturated then dry cycles and clay soils, too. Then there are the bugs. Everything gets eaten by something. So so so so so many bugs.

But in Utah, those common ornamentals absolutely thrive _if_ they get water. When you irrigate here, things grow like crazy. Flowers are huge and there are basically no bugs here at all. (I don't count box alder beetles or brine flies as "lots of bugs".)

But native vegetation can survive the actual climate here, while most ornamentals can't without extra water.

Eugenioides is sweet in a way that no other coffee I ever had is sweet.

You sometimes see "sweet" as an axis of flavor of coffee, or as a tasting note on a bag of fancy beans; but eugenioides is very different.

It's _the_ dominant note in that cup, and it is much less fruity or floral, it's just... sweet. You taste the sweetness, and then the rest of the "typical" coffee notes come in the background, but much less pronounced than usual.

I've seen people describe it as a "cereal-like", and while I don't think I fully agree with that description, I do get where they're coming from.

If you're a coffee person and ever see a bag of it on offer (and can afford it), I definitely recommend grabbing it — it's really, really unique (and quite rare!).

(And I do not think this is in any way related to the caffeine content — otherwise most of decafs would be very sweet, and they obviously aren't).

The biggest reason decaf brews, tastes, and grinds so different is the processing essentially causes the beans to expands (so you can extract the caffeine out of the center of the very dense, green coffee) and then you need to dehydrate them back to the proper moisture content for roasting. You take a green coffee that is previously extremely dense and non-porous, and make it much much more porous. This leads to roasting difficulities and brittleness when grinding which seems to lead to fines.

I'd agree, less caffeine in the bean without decaffinating would lead to a better tasting coffee (if you want the lesser caffeine).

Robusta is great if you don't go with the low quality stuff. Good quality Vietnamese Robusta is very enjoyable (and much higher in caffeine than Arabica, which I think is a nice bonus).

There's also the possibility of hybridizing Robusta and Arabica to get the best traits of both. A few hybrid varieties, such as Catimor, have existed on the market for a while. AFAIK Catimor has some of the hardiness of its parent Robusta.

As always, you'll have the best experience if you buy whole beans and grind them yourself (or at least find a supermarket that lets you grind beans fresh). No instant coffee that currently exists will be able to compete with that.

Vietnam seems to like it, fine. Pretty popular in France and Germany, too. If you have ever had Bustelo, then you've had it.

Yeah, the 'flat white' espresso/milk drink which is now sold all over the world is from Australia.

I guess coming up with a new drink that appeals to people enough to go global happens easier in a place with a coffee culture.

As a Swede who enjoys the occasional flat white: thanks, Australia! :)

Yeah, given you bump into a different coffee shop every 100ft in Melbourne, I'd be surprised if tea was winning.

Tea bushes use an entirely different metabolic pathway to produce caffeine than coffee bushes.

Here is an article that further describes how we believe caffeine synthesis evolved in multiple land plant lineages.

https://www.pnas.org/content/113/38/10613

Caffeine synthesis involves several enzymes, but the enzyme family (called the SABATH family) involved in the final stages of its synthesis can trace its origins back to the first land plants. These first enzymes are thought to have been very promiscuous (capable of having activity with several molecules), partially contributing to how caffeine synthesis managed to evolve independently multiple times throughout the evolutionary history of land plants.

Tea leaves usually have more caffeine than coffee beans, but tea itself is usually more diluted than coffee.

If you want a jolt, make a matcha shot with the same mass of matcha as you would normally do for coffee ;)

This is why I routinely wean myself from coffee by drinking tea on most holiday weekends. I feel it helps me to dissociate less while I should be present with family, plus when I return to work I have much less residual caffeine and can hit peak productivity, crank out some code. Props to devs who don’t rely on drugs!

> I knew a woman who couldn't eat chocolate because she found the amount of caffeine to be too high.

I think the causality went the other way in that case. I've been roughly caffeine free at certain intervals. Never felt anything from chocolate.

>If you truly detox from caffeine even extremely small amounts will be noticeable.

Maybe for a subset of people. Otherwise kids will be getting crazy jitters the first time they eat chocolate (presumably before they ever drank coffee/tea), which obviously doesn't happen.

As I read it, he's not denying the effects either. He's just saying that not everything bad that happens wrt climate and weather is due to "climate change". Sometimes, it's just variations, which have always happened.