IF YOU prefer decaffeinated coffee, there may soon be a tastier, entirely natural brand available. Brazilian investigators have discovered varieties of the most popular coffee plant from Ethiopia that don鈥檛 contain caffeine.
Decaffeinated coffee is expensive to make from normal coffee, and doesn鈥檛 taste as good, as solvents used to extract the caffeine also remove some flavour compounds. But now a team led by Paulo Mazzafera at the University of Campinas has discovered the first naturally decaffeinated varieties of the Coffea arabica plant.
鈥淭his species is responsible for more than 75 per cent of traded coffee,鈥� Mazzafera says. His team believes the decaf plants lack functional caffeine synthase, the enzyme crucial for making caffeine from theobromine in leaves (Nature, vol 429, p 826).
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鈥淪o far, caffeine-free natural coffees have been Madagascan species which are outside the mainstream, and not easy to breed from,鈥� says Pablo Dubois, head of operations at the International Coffee Organization in London. But Mazzafera hopes the decaf strains could hit the market within five years.