Slashdot Mirror
Decaffeinated, Real Coffee
reeb writes "ABC News Australia reports that Brazilian scientists have discovered a naturally occurring but rare coffee plant, native to Ethiopia, that is 'almost free of caffeine.' Decaf without the genetic engineering?"
Cue a host of teenagers racing to prove how cool they are by saying things like "If there's no caffeine there's no point ROR!"
Cross breeding may take a while, though, so maybe by the time I'm not allowed to have caffeine anymore (vis-a-vis old age restrictions on my cardiac function) I'll have that option.
Granted, I'm not 18 anymore, but I'm not 40 yet either.
Unitarian Church: Freethinkers Congregate!
This is appalling news. We must write our congress people to tell them we want a war against the lack of drugs. This heretical coffee plant must be wiped out. Coffee should have caffeine!
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
From www.kraftfoods.com/maxwellhouse/mh_decaff.html
The Maxwell House® Family of naturally decaffeinated coffees offers the full-flavored taste of regular coffee, without the caffeine. Maxwell House® decaffeinates its coffees using pure water and natural effervescence. The effervescence gently draws the caffeine out of the beans, preserving their delicate coffee flavor.
I don't touch decaf, but who would genetically engineer decaf beans?
This is important because the headline/blurb is misleading.
Decaffeination is done through a process called 'supercritical fluid extraction' with carbon dioxide as a solvent. Turns out, with enough pressure and temperature, a substance can go 'supercritical', where it has the simultaneous properties of a gas, liquid, and solid. By fine tuning the temperature and pressure, it can act as a very selective solvent, only leeching out the caffeine and leaving in all the other delicious coffee flavors. The caffeine is then recovered and sold in pills or other products.
Not that you should drink decaf. Caffeine is the primary reason to drink coffee.
What is the problem with "genetic engineering"? We've been doing it for ages with breeding, as has "nature."
..it never had any caffeine to start with.
;)
it's cafeine free.. with the same taste apparently.
why would you drink coffee just for the taste is beyond me though when you could be drinking it with caffeine
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
...tasting coffee around. Just look at the hordes of /.ers showing off how they only care about the caffeine and not the taste.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I don't think I'm alone in preferring big cups of very strong coffee (made with an espresso machine), but I'm not always interested in the huge shot of caffine that a large, dense cup of espresso gives me. I get jittery, post unwise things online, and generally have to pace for a while before the peak buzz wears off and I can get real work done. So if this stuff could be bred with some of the really tasty beans to produce a delicious coffee that has, say 20% of the caffine, that's the stuff I'd be buying. (As long as FairTrade growers grew it.)
I've only ever had one cup of coffee, and that was purely for the caffeine. I much prefer a good cup of tea. Part of my routine is Yorkshire Gold to send me up in the morning, and a big mug of South African Rooibos (naturally caffeine-free, I might add) to bring me down at night. ..that and a good seven or eight pints of Yorkshire throughout the day :-)
Decaf coffee is (or at least can be) produced from "real" coffee by soaking it in supercritical carbon dioxide. Last I checked, that was relatively cheap, effective, environmentally friendly and has nothing to do with genetic engineering.
What is the problem with "genetic engineering"? We've been doing it for ages with breeding, as has "nature."
That's about as insightful as if people started plowing their SUVs though other peoples' yards and living rooms and then saying, "What's the problem with driving? People have been driving cars for a hundred years."
The difference is we've been driving mostly on roads. And we've been breeding plants and animals using natural methods and reproductive techniques and only being selective about which individuals bred with one another. (Oh, btw, I like the way you put "nature" in quotes. You can almost see the sneer on your face when you typed it. What are you afraid of?)
Genetic engineering removes the guardrails and lets the SUVs into the living rooms. Tinkering with the knobs of life is dangerous when you don't know exactly how it works in the first place. "Hey let's see what happens when we turn on this gene! Ooops. Plague! Who knew? Hey, don't blame us. We were just twiddling the knobs."
There's a reason fish don't breed with strawberries in the natural world. It might not be a good idea to discover exactly what that reason is until we know a whole lot more about the way DNA works.
- Hail to our fearless misleader! Fool speed ahead!
Unfortunately there will be flavor loss in caffeine free or decaffeinated coffee. it is inevitable as one of the major flavor compounds is the caffeine itself. caffeine has a strong acid (sour) flavor and is quite distinctive as a coffee component. just bite on a caffeine pill some time and compare it to a cup of standard starbucks black roast. i personally prefer a slightly sour (perhaps acrid) coffee with a slight fruity nose. of course decaffeination will not affect the flavor of the average low grade truck stop/diner coffee as that is already very nasty.
There are some serious implications to directly manipulating genes as opposed to just going through the natural breeding process. Previously, people just grew and harvested stuff until it had the best of the properties that they wanted, now we are starting to get genes from other places and just kind of force the plant to make it. Until now, it wasn't possible to cross a fish or a spider and a plant that grows corn. This is the danger with trying GMO's as opposed to just planting the seeds of the tallest corn stalk and eating the rest of the corn until all the corn grew tall.
... is like going on a date alone.
Sure, you can do it, but what's the point?
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
God obviously made this version of the plant rare for a reason. So let's not get needlessly heretical here or anything.
And the brethren went away edified.
...under "Products Least Likely To Be Sold By Think Geek...
Why would anyone want coffee without the caffeine?
That's the whole point of drinking the foul muck.
Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.
All you people did not see the most obvious use for this new coffee bean:
Surreptitious replacement of the caffeinated coffee brewed by your PHB.
If they do, the world will probably fight another Opium War.
Well, if they can engineer resistance to Roundup, they can engineer CAFFEINATED CORN!
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
How do you think He was able to create everything in 7 days straight? Oh, you are talking about decaffeinated coffee... never mind.
I might be the only person in my shoes, but I've never noticed that coffee does anything for me. I'm a bit OCD, so my brain might not be wired quite right, but I can start my day without coffee, and I could have three big cups right before I go to bed, and there's no difference. I just like the taste of the caffeinated stuff better.