Good News For A Change

I drink coffee more for its taste than for the caffeine, so this is good news to me.

Mother Nature's Decaff Coffee
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor

The quest for a full-flavoured decaffeinated coffee may be over: scientists report today that they have found a naturally decaffeinated version of the world's most popular coffee bean.

Full-strength coffee can raise blood pressure, trigger palpitations and disrupt sleep, and decaffeinated now accounts for about 10 per cent of the world market.

But the decaffeinating process often flushes out important flavour compounds, so the demand for a flavoursome, low-caffeine blend remains high.

Attempts to transfer caffeine-free characteristics from wild coffee species in Madagascar to Coffea arabica, the most cultivated and consumed coffee in the world, have failed - and would produce an inferior beverage anyway.

The solution would be to find a naturally decaffeinated C. arabica plant, a species normally recognised for its high-quality beans.

This is what Prof Paulo Mazzafera of State University of Campinas, Brazil, and colleagues at the Agronomic Institute of Campinas report today in the journal Nature.

After screening 3,000 coffee trees, they have isolated three C. arabica plants from Ethiopia with naturally low caffeine content, probably because they have a faulty caffeine-making enzyme.

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