Tuesday, March 20, 2012

For coffee lovers

People are addicted to coffee everywhere, but some of its side effects of the caffeine are not wanted by all users. Researchers have been trying for years to come up with a decaffeinated coffee just as tasty as the original, but it has not been an easy feat. Due to the chemicals needed to extract the caffeine from the beans before roasting, the flavor of the coffee is depleated emencely.

Nature International Weekly Journal of Science, holds an article of Paula Mazzafera who is determined to accomplish what seems impossible. His research started with him extracting samples of coffee chemicals and analyzing them to find one without caffeine and after screening thousands of plants for over two decades he came acrossed one that lacked caffeine.

He eventually teamed up with numerous coffee breeders but each time his success only went so far. The breeders were not as patient as he was. The problem was that hundreds of coffee plants do not contain caffeine or have very low percentages of it, but are not capable of being harvested due to the lack of flowering and small seed size.

Still with a non-exsistent success rate many, and especially Mazzafera, continue the quest for the natural noncaffeinated coffee bean. Today, Mazzafera has his own plants of a C. arabica variety that are nearly caffeine free. However, these plants are highly susceptible to cross pollination which can reinstate caffeine production in the beans. Nevertheless, Mazzafera and others are still determined to produce a commercially viable strain.

3 comments:

  1. I dont drink coffee so i dont know the differences, but this article is intresting in the fact that because of such a high demand by the people they are trying new things to please all the different coffee drinkers (also to make new varieties and styles to make more money).

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  2. Many people drink coffee simply because of the amount of caffeine in it. I guess it would be useful for people who like to have a cup of coffee right before bed time.

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  3. I drink coffee everyday and the tastes between decaf and regular coffee is pretty different, but the effects they have on you is what makes the difference. Decaf coffee does not keep you up like regular coffee does. It is interesting how the plants that did not obtain caffeine had a smaller seed size and less flowering.

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