COFFEE NEWS

Many of the more macho coffee drinkers think that all decaffeinated coffee is beside the point. “Why bother?” they ask.

But those who value the taste of coffee as well as the stimulation may disagree. Then, there are those people who, despite their love and appreciation of coffee, can’t tolerate much caffeine; others, who tolerate it well in the early part of the day, can’t sleep if they drink coffee later in the day. Caffeine metabolism varies widely among individuals. Generally, men process caffeine faster than women, especially pregnant women, who are slowest. The liver metabolizes caffeine, so age and liver health also affect one’s tolerance. (See “Caffeine and Decaf” in the curator’s Joy of Coffee, or the Wikipedia entry on caffeine.)

All this brings us to decaffeinated coffee.

All decaffeination methods adversely affect flavor, but careful selection of green beans along with competent roasting and brewing can produce a cup that may fool the experts.

As recently as the mid-’80s, people were drinking more decaf, thinking that caffeine was bad for them. As more and more research showed the health benefits of coffee, people began to switch back to caffeine. Sales of decaf in the late ’80s for some roasters were as high as 25 percent of total coffee sales. Today, among both commercial and specialty roasters, the percentage is more like 10 to 15: lower, but still a significant portion of coffee drinking.

Please suspend any chemo-phobia you may have while reading this. Don’t let the technical words for chemicals put you off, and don’t play into the hands of the irresponsible scare tactics of unscrupulous advertisers of Swiss Water-process decaffeination.

There are four main methods of decaffeination in wide use today, each named for the solvent used: di-hydro-oxide (aka water), ethyl acetate, supercritical CO2, and methylene chloride (dichloromethane in Europe). Even if you remember your high school chemistry, the words may be unfamiliar, but keep that chemo-phobia in check. (A new method using ultraviolet light is coming to the market. Don’t get your hopes up–poor flavor, so far.)

All methods produce a range of quality primarily due to bean selection (garbage in = garbage out) and process temperature, which affects the speed and thus the cost of processing. The American standard for decaffeinated coffee is to remove 97 percent of the original caffeine. Since caffeine content of individual coffees varies widely (see my earlier post on the topic), the amount of residual caffeine will also vary. Unfortunately, all decaffeination methods adversely affect flavor, but careful selection of green beans along with competent roasting and brewing can produce a cup that may fool the experts.

For decades, we have preferred coffees decaffeinated with methylene chloride (MC) because time after time, year after year, they have produced the most flavorful cup. The method is simple enough. First, steam swells the beans to make it easier for the caffeine to be removed. The solvent is then circulated through the beans and then into distillation to remove the caffeine and wax that have been removed from the beans. The cleansed solvent is recirculated and re-distilled until the caffeine has been removed. The beans are then rinsed with water and vacuum-dried.

The most sensitive test for detecting residual MC detects as little as one part per million. I have never seen a test result that detects any amount in specialty decaf. Furthermore, the boiling point of the solvent is 104 degrees F and coffee is roasted at 375 to 425 degrees F. Any remaining solvent, if there were any, would be vaporized during roasting. MC has been eliminated from cosmetics and has stringent worker safety regulations in Europe, but the procedures used in coffee processing and roasting leave nothing to cause any concern.

Most important, after safety, is taste. MC is the most selective solvent, leaving the greatest coffee flavor in the beans.

We have also cupped many samples that have been decaffeinated using either ethyl acetate or carbon dioxide (CO2). Neither method has consistently produced satisfying flavor in the cup. Ethyl acetate, a synthetic fruit ester, leaves a fruity aftertaste in the coffee–unfortunately nothing like the berry and citrus flavors we find in East African coffees. And we had high hopes for the CO2 process in the early ’90s. Carbon dioxide is the carbonation in sparkling water, but it is forced into the coffee at pressures well in excess of 1000 pounds per square inch to extract the caffeine. Perhaps it’s the pressure that also forces out the coffee flavor.

The last method to discuss is dihydro-oxide–water. At one time, water process was the most damaging to coffee flavor. That general statement is no longer true, due to improvements in the processing by some companies. Although some water-process decaf has flavor approaching methylene chloride (and a relatively new North American company is making great strides in cup quality), further development will be required before it can be methylene chloride’s equal.

In general the process uses water as the solvent, supersaturated with soluble solids from green coffee beans, except caffeine. The idea is that when the warm solvent is circulated through the coffee, it will extract only caffeine, which in turn is removed from the circulating fluid with activated carbon. It’s a thesis that in practice has not produced great cups of decaf.

The old standby water decaffeination company, Swiss Water (the only attempt to brand a process), of Vancouver, Canada, is doing all the advertising while others are improving their process. We prefer the cup quality of other companies, and I deplore the marketing tactics of Swiss Water.

In the late ’80s, when I first wrote to the previous owners, I decried their deliberately misleading advertising. Here they go again. They are falling back into advertising tactics that assume the ignorance of the audience. Their attempt to associate the chemical names of the other processes with some chemo-hysteria is unethical.

To summarize, of the four major processes for decaf, only methylene chloride and water are widely used in specialty coffee (here, by the way, Wikipedia on decaffeination is less strong than it is on caffeine). Methylene chloride can produce the best cup results when good coffee and careful processing are used. Good coffee and careful processing also produce the best results from dihydro-oxide, but the best is still second in cup quality to MC.

Source: http://food.theatlantic.com/coffee-culture/in-defense-of-decaff-1.php

Indonesia has the second largest area of coffee plantations in the world but due to low yields it only ends up as the fifth largest producer after Brazil, Colombia, Vietnam, and India, a researcher said.

Surip Mawardi, a researcher from the Indonesian Coffee and Cocoa Research Institute (ICCRI), said last week that Indonesia’s coffee plantation area totaled 1.3 million hectares but its production was still less than 700 kilograms per hectare per year.

“It’s very low compared to Vietnam’s annual production of 1,540 kilograms per hectare, Colombia’s 1,220 kilograms, and Brazil’s 1,000 kilograms.

“That’s why Vietnam is up from fifth largest producer to second largest, while Indonesia is down to fifth from third largest producer in the world,” he said.

Surip was speaking to the press after addressing a seminar on Indonesian coffee development, which was organized by PT. Nestle Indonesia, the subsidiary of Nestle S.A. the world’s leading producer of food and beverages.

Latest Agriculture Ministry data shows that Brazil, with a total area under coffee plantations of 2.37 million hectares has a total production of 2.02 million tons per year, Colombia with 560,000 hectares produces 744,000 tons per year, Vietnam with 491,800 hectares produces 1.05 million tons per year, while India with 328,000 hectares has an annual production of 507,000 tons.

“It’s because these countries adopted best farming practices with advanced agricultural technology. But we in Indonesia are yet to apply such technology to all of our coffee farmers.

“Most of our farmers are not yet aware of the importance of having good seedlings for their plantations,” he noted.

To address the problem, Achmad Manggabarani, the ministry’s director general of plantations, said in the same seminar that the government was pursuing efforts to promote the use of so-called Somatic Embryogenesis (SE) techniques among Indonesian coffee farmers and urged them to use plantlets and seedlings developed this way.

He said that the application of the SE technique had been pursued in cooperation with ICCRI, a state-owned agricultural research institute under the ministry of agriculture, and Nestle Indonesia — the largest buyers of coffee beans in Indonesia, with total annual purchases of about 70,000 tons of coffee per year, mostly from plantations in Sumatra.

Nestle claims to be the first corporation in the world using SE techniques in coffee plantations.
The Nestle research and development center in Tours in France, has conducted a mapping of Indonesia’s coffee trees and had identified 33 elite types, of which six of the best are being evaluated.

The chosen elite plantlets, which will be used to produce coffee seedlings, will be multiplied using SE technique that can produce up to 22 million plantlets per year.

The SE project is expected improve the coffee farmers’ competitive advantage in the international market by helping them to grow the best strains of coffee plantlets.

“This year we’ve targeted that our farmers in Sumatra and Java will grow about one million of such seedlings.

“Until now we’ve managed to secure the planting of 500,000 seedlings. Next year we target the planting of four million seedlings, and then in 2011 six million seedlings,” Achmad said.

With every hectare being able to accommodate 1,300 seedlings, the area that had been planted with the new seedlings has now reached about 385 hectares.

He said that the government was serious in developing coffee plantations as coffee was one of the top commodities in the country.

Employing 2.3 million people across the archipelago, the coffee plantation sector contribution to foreign exchange has been increasing during the last four years from US$504.4 million in 2005, to $588.50 million in 2006, to $636.42 millions or 11.66 percent of total agricultural exports in 2007, to $991.46 million or 24 percent of total agricultural exports in 2008.

“The SE technique has been also successfully applied to our cocoa plantations. Such techniques can increase the coffee yield by more than 100 percent from the current yield of less than 700 kilograms per hectare per year.

“By applying this, we hope we can double our coffee production and income in the next five years,” he said.

This year we’ve targeted that our farmers in Sumatra and Java will grow about one million of such seedlings.

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2009/07/06/ri-moves-raise-coffee-output.html

Malaysia’s health authorities have seized over 20,000 dollars worth of coffee mixed with sildenafil, the main ingredient in erectile dysfunction drug Viagra, a report said Sunday.

“The coffee mixture had been distributed in sachets nationwide,” an official was quoted as saying by the New Sunday Times newspaper.

“Officers found 900 boxes containing more than 9,000 sachets of the coffee mixture which retailed for more than 80 ringgit (23 dollars) per box,” the officer added without naming the coffee brand in question.

Enforcement officials said the coffee was mixed with sildenafil to “perk up” drinkers beyond the usual stimulation provided by caffeine.

Health authorities recently raided the distribution company located in Gombak, just north of the capital Kuala Lumpur, the report said.

It cited a health ministry official as saying the company used individuals to distribute the product in small quantities to evade detection by enforcement agencies.

“Investigations revealed that the distributor attempted to mislead the public by claiming that the coffee mixture could provide an energy boost, besides being beneficial for men,” he added.

Two years ago Malaysia made its largest single drug bust when it seized at least four million dollars-worth of a fake erectile dysfunction treatment labelled “Miagra”.

The counterfeit pills, closely resembling the blue pills of the genuine Viagra brand, were destined for Malaysian and Thai markets.

Source: http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_asiapacific/view/440518/1/.html

A faint aroma of wood smoke wafting through the old, chilly Central Maine Power building provides the first indication that Matt Bolinder is roasting up a new batch of coffee.
 

Some of the first few flakes of the year are falling outside, sliding past the high, round windows of the mostly-vacant factory building. Inside, any body heat that escapes parkas and hats makes a beeline for the 20-foot ceilings, leaving the bodies that produced it shivering where they stand on the rough shop floor.

But hidden in a back room where, decades ago, CMP workers spent their days welding metal, Bolinder stoked the fire beneath his coffee roaster until it approached 400 degrees. Feeding it with maple and ash wood that he had cut himself, he feverishly checked gauges and pulled walnut-sized scoops of Guatemala Huehue Tenango coffee beans from the drum to sniff them.

He is roasting his weekly batch of coffee, but it’s no ordinary coffee, he says as he tweaks his Italian-made, elk-sized roaster.

Roasting coffee with a wood-fired roaster is better, for one, because it “is traditional,” he says. “A thousand years ago, coffee beans were being roasted over wood fires in Ethiopia, so this is pretty old-school.”

But the biggest reason for Bolinder’s preference for wood-fired roasting goes to heart of the most important aspect of coffee drinking: taste.

“Coffee has more flavor components than wine,” he says.

Bolinder says the style of roasting used by most companies, especially large ones, burns the beans, so that the taste that many people associate with coffee is actually charred bean material, not the natural flavor of the coffee oil. Roasters who heat with wood fire take great care to bring the beans to the precise temperature that brings the coffee oils to the surface of the beans, stopping short of charring.

Wood smoke circulates through the roaster, coming in contact with the beans and contributing to the flavor. Taking the slogan “We burn wood, not beans,” Bolinder says that the wood smoke replaces the more common, but less traditional and less desirable flavor of charred beans. Matt’s Coffee is certified by the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, and Bolinder points with pride to the fact that wood fire cuts down on petroleum use.

Wood-fired roasters like Bolinder’s Italian-made one are hardly the industry standard today. While they are more common in Europe, fewer than five percent of roasters in the United States are heated with wood, according to Ric Rhinehart, executive director of the Specialty Coffee Association of America, a trade association for the specialty coffee industry.

Rhinehart discounted the idea that a wood-fueled fire has any effect on coffee’s taste, attributing the difference rather to the care that wood-fired roasters typically take to prevent scorching the coffee beans. In his opinion, using wood to fire a roaster “has no tangible benefit.”

Still, he said, “I think that roasting coffee is an art and a science,” he said. “And like all good crafts, it’s the manifestation of the art in the hand of the artisan, and the science of that’s behind the design and performance of the machine. I would never say there’s only one way to roast coffee.”

But Dustin Karnes, owner of Austin, Texas-based Summermoon Wood Fired Coffee, bristled at the suggestion that wood firing has no effect on taste and alleged that Rhinehart’s statement was influenced by the fact that his association is dominated by more traditional coffee roasters.

(Rhinehart said his association counts at least a dozen members who use wood-fire roasters.)

“It’s been challenging to go up against the established coffee makers,” Karnes said of his small company. “A lot of people are intrigued by the concept and like the taste.”

Here in Waterville, Bolinder is probing a niche that he thinks has gone unexplored in Maine and northern New England. Since his coffee beans have a shelf life of about two weeks, he sees his primary market area as being the state of Maine.

He is one of the first tenants in the Hathaway-Lockwood Mills-CMP compound being developed by Paul Boghossian, but it is a temporary situation. At some point as the development progresses, Boghossian said he will probably find another property somewhere in Waterville for the roaster, suggesting that a retail coffee shop featuring Bolinder’s coffees would fit into his plans for the site.

“(Bolinder) has seen quite a bit of interest in the Portland area,” Boghossian said. “It’s an interesting niche he’s trying to fill. I’ve had some of his product, and it’s quite good.”

Source: http://kennebecjournal.mainetoday.com/news/local/4493152.html

Learn more about wood roasted coffee here: http://www.millarscoffee.com/

Hefty jolts of caffeine have reinvigorated the brains of old, demented mice at the University of South Florida.

Mice aren’t humans. And caffeine jitters aren’t for the faint of heart. But the caffeine connection raises intriguing possibilities for treating Alzheimer’s disease.

USF scientists “were able to look both at the idea of treatment — giving caffeine to animals that have already developed pathology — as well as prevention,” said Neil Buckholtz, chief of the dementias of aging branch of the National Institute on Aging. “It’s really interesting.”

So should you binge on latte or invest in Starbucks?

No way, Buckholtz and others cautioned.

“Lots of things have proven effective in mouse models but very few have been tested in humans,” he said. “That’s the gold standard, to see how this translates to humans.”

The caffeine study, described in today’s online version of the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, was performed on mice genetically engineered to develop high levels of beta-amyloid, a protein associated with Alzheimer’s in human brains.

Such mice typically start showing cognitive decline and elevated beta-amyloid levels by 8 or 9 months of age. As they grow older, they also develop sticky clumps of amyloid plaque in their brains, another sign of human Alzheimer’s.

Three years ago, the USF group showed that putting the mice on a high-caffeine diet soon after birth seems to prevent or delay these symptoms.

The latest experiments were aimed at treatment.

The mice received no caffeine until they were 18 to 19 months old, the human equivalent of about 70.

By then, the mice had progressed well into their dementia. Beta-amyloid levels were high, protein clumps had developed in their brains, and they performed poorly on memory tests.

For four or five weeks, some of the mice received pure caffeine in their drinking water, equivalent to 500 milligrams a day in an average human. That’s what you would get in about five 8-ounce cups of regular coffee or 14 12-ounce cans of Coke Classic.

Control mice drank straight water.

Then all the mice went swimming.

Many bad turns

In water mazes, mice swim around until they discover a comforting underwater platform that allows them to stand up and rest. Researchers return them to the water and watch how quickly they navigate their way back to the platform.

Normal mice with good memories find the platform without too many bad turns. A demented mouse struggles to learn.

In the USF study, demented mice fed straight water took more than twice as many bad turns as normal mice did.

But the demented mice fed caffeine found the platforms about as well as the normal mice.

Furthermore, their brains contained fewer plaques and lower beta-amyloid levels than the brains of mice that drank straight water.

“There were rather striking benefits” of caffeine, said Dr. Gary Arendash of USF’s Florida Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and lead author on the journal article. “There was reversal of memory impairment in mice, which leads us to believe that caffeine could be a very attractive treatment for the disease.”

Caffeine did not improve the performance of normal mice, ruling out the possibility that extra adrenaline led to better scores.

Source: http://www.tampabay.com/news/health/research/article1015948.ece