10 ms·
All arabica coffee is genetically similar: how can beans taste so different?
- gmuslera 3y agoBrassica oleracea would have a word there.
- perihelions 3y agoFor the convenience of people looking this up, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brassica_oleracea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brassica_oleracea ("includes many common cultivars used as vegetables, such as cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, collard greens, Savoy cabbage, kohlrabi, and gai lan") https://xkcd.com/2827/ https://xkcd.com/2827/
- shiandow 3y agoI wonder if the cultivars of brassica oleracea have greater genetic variation.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- moate 3y agoTerroir. That’s it, that’s the post.
- tgv 3y agoWas my first idea upon reading the article. I remember being surprised when I was abroad and asked about nice looking tree, and it turned out to be a Rhododendron, which only grows as a medium sized bush in my country. Climate and soil make a huge difference, even at ±1500km. Coffee is grown all over the world.
- AdamN 3y agoYou can buy different fertilizer for rhododendron to change the color.
- IdiranVibe 3y agoIIRC they change colour depending on how acidic or alkaline the soil is!
- soneca 3y agoNo, that’s not the post. > ” they seem to be mainly the result of wholesale swapping, deletion and rearrangement of chromosomes.” The article is fairly informative about the genetics of coffee, btw. Well worth reading.
- moate 3y agoDid we read the same article? I saw no mentions of volatile aromatics(aka the flavor and aroma compounds) and how they isolated them in different strains. I saw no mention of what genetic markers are tied to specific flavor profiles. I did see a lot about disease and pest resistance. My glib comment is how the title seems to have fuckall to do with flavor (which, again, is affected predominantly by the terroir, or more specifically the mineral/chemical uptake of plants in a similar region) as the article is just run of the mill “people in a commercial industry and doing science to understand their product, isn’t that neat?” content.
- hobo_mark 3y agoAll coffee and all wine tastes the same to me, can people really tell the difference or is it mostly an upper class pantomime?
- jghn 3y agoHave you compared single origin coffees from wildly different regions of the world?
- hobo_mark 3y agoOf course not, but I often have colleagues qualify some coffee as "excellent" and some other as "terrible" and I cannot ever tell the two apart.
- scld 3y agobtw, I don't think the poster above is being snarky. There are many coffee shops that will serve two distinct single origin brews and you can just compare by ordering one of each.
- jghn 3y agoI was indeed not being snarky. There are plenty of outlier examples but if someone set in front of me an arbitrary coffee from Costa Rica, Ethiopia, and Sumatra I'd usually be able to tell you which was which.
- strken 3y agoThey really do taste different. Try a French roast vs a light roast some time if you want an extreme example, or a very tart wine and a very sweet one. The outliers at each end of the spectrum are very different. If you can't tell which is which in those cases then you might legitimately have a problem with your sense of taste.
- candiddevmike 3y ago
- happytiger 3y agoThis matters a great deal as the coffee crops are under threat from climate change and if they are to survive at scale will need broad domestication. Large scale effort is going into it as it is a very important cash crop. Understanding where they get their flavor and how to replicate it can only lead to better success in this effort.
- amelius 3y agoAs Asia is increasingly becoming caffeine addicted we can expect these crops becoming a real disaster very quickly. Palm oil will be nothing compared to this.
- the-mitr 3y ago> we can expect these crops becoming a real disaster very quickly. Can you elaborate why?
- afiori 3y agoMy guess would be that they expect massive and irresponsible conversion of wild areas into farmland.
- happytiger 3y agoIt’s complex. Demand is outstripping supply in something economists like to call The Coffee Paradox which actually has a book on the subject by the same name: https://www.amazon.com/Coffee-Paradox-Markets-Commodity-Development/dp/1842774573#:~:text=They%20do%20so%20by%20analysing,and%20other%20'sustainable'%20coffees https://www.amazon.com/Coffee-Paradox-Markets-Commodity-Deve.... More information on the short term and long term issues here: https://financialpost.com/financial-times/peak-coffee-global-thirst-grows-trouble-brewing https://financialpost.com/financial-times/peak-coffee-global... https://m.economictimes.com/small-biz/trade/exports/insights/coffee-prices-poised-to-climb-with-bean-shortfall-nearing-third-year/articleshow/97160098.cms https://m.economictimes.com/small-biz/trade/exports/insights... But the most pressing issues long term are best summarized by this article which if you read nothing else is probably the best answer to your question: https://econreview.berkeley.edu/a-world-without-coffee-the-story-behind-a-possible-impending-coffee-crisis/ https://econreview.berkeley.edu/a-world-without-coffee-the-s... To boot, coffee is a monoculture and deeply vulnerable like bananas.
- n4r9 3y agoGenerally, an organism's phenotypes (observable characteristics) are a combination of its genes and its environment. It's a bit like saying "These twins are genetically identical despite growing up at different altitudes, so how can their skin tone be so different?"
- shultays 3y agoDo they taste different though
- sph 3y agoWhat animals and plant eat affect their taste. You do not only taste the protein, you taste the acorn-fed pig (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jam%C3%B3n_ib%C3%A9rico https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jam%C3%B3n_ib%C3%A9rico)
- mc32 3y agoThey probably have different tastes, right?
- actionfromafar 3y agoMostly no if some random Netflix documentaries are to be believed. :)
- throwup238 3y agoI think we need a blind twin taste test to find out.
- Levitating 3y agoExactly, I find the conclusion in the subheading weird. > Flavour variations are mainly the result of changes at the chromosome level, sequencing effort finds. Though from my limited understanding of coffee tasting, environment is one of the biggest factors in taste. Especially the altitude changes the way to plant grows and develops toxins. > Even if a single-origin Colombian coffee bean harvest was roasted and ground in the same way as a batch from Ethiopia, a coffee connoisseur would be able to tell the difference. But Colombia especially is known for its variety in environments for coffee harvest. So regardless of finding genetic differences between variants, I am not sure they can draw the conclusion that this is what creates variety in flavor. They don't make the claim that a coffee connoisseur could taste the differences of two different coffee variants grown in the same environment.
- evertedsphere 3y agoSee: dogs.
- boringuser2 3y agoI wonder how much of it is simply fake/psychological like wine tasting.
- deelowe 3y agoIt's not fake. That said, I'm not sure what all makes a difference. For example, I'm not sure how much altitude affects things. Bean size definitely seems to. Same goes for the process (wet, honey, natural, etc). And, of course, the roast makes a huge difference. There are some roasters out there who offer kits where you can get the same wash, same roast in different origins so you can compare and there is definitely a difference. I've had some that were extremely fruity, almost cherry tasting and others that were much more earthy/tobacco tasting. I like more fruity coffees and I find that these tend be more common in beans from Africa.
- kelipso 3y agoCoffee brewed a few degrees of temperature apart tastes fairly different to me. I get annoyed by people who say the difference in taste must be in your imagination. It's like color blind people saying you must be imagining the difference in red and green colors.
- 0xbadcafebee 3y agoIt's not your imagination, it's science (although it does depend on the other variables). The temperature of water changes the extraction of dissolved and undissolved solids from the bean into the water, and water changes whether oils, esters, acids, etc are folded or not, which is what we perceive as flavor (aroma combined with the 6 tastes). It's unlikely that only a few degrees would be perceptible by most people, but for supertasters, with the right coffee, it's possible.
- gottorf 3y ago> I get annoyed by people who say the difference in taste must be in your imagination. I have a friend who is a supertaster, and I'm probably whatever is the opposite of that, due to lifelong allergies. We amaze each other sometimes when we eat together.
- robg 3y agoI’ve loved the concept of terrior since first hearing it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terroir https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terroir Seems to not only explain crops and tastes but also more abstractly people, and the differences in outcomes by zip codes, for instance. You are where you grow.
- hammock 3y agoThe concept of terroir needs to be introduced to the produce aisle of the grocery store. Easy shortcut to explaining why our fruits and veggies have no taste or nutrition anymore. We destroyed any natural terroir through tilling, fertilizer and pest control
- mtillman 3y agoThis is part of it. The other part is that we demand produce year round which means transportation and long term storage. This is why tomatoes all taste meh now. As to nutrition, I’d recommend switching to frozen as it looses less value in transportation.
- dkasper 3y agoFunny as people use to always feel frozen was not as “healthy” as fresh
- dagw 3y agoAs long as we insist on being able to buy cheap fruits and veggies year round with no regards to what is or isn't in season, we have no one but ourselves to blame.
- robg 3y agoOrganic seems to sell well, but often just as tasteless. I bet the market would recognize something like a terroir label which designate the value of taste. The price of apples for instance seems to reflect this already, the pricier ones do taste better. The taste of apples also seems pretty resilient to long cold storage.
- jl6 3y agoHeadline: All arabica coffee is genetically similar But: > The study found evidence of significant chromosomal rearrangements, especially in a varietal of C. arabica called Bourbon. There were deletions, in which fragments of chromosomes were missing — in some cases large chunks — and even instances in which entire chromosomes were absent. Does this really count as genetically similar? I would have imagined that the presence and order of genes was an important aspect of genetic variation.
- photochemsyn 3y agoThe paper itself goes into some more detail on that - the genetic diversity is found in the organization of the units among the chromosomes, while the units themselves (e.g. caffeine biosynthesis genes etc. are identical). This results in variations in gene expression levels, which alone is apparently enough to produce distinct varietals. > "While none of the different chromosomal aberrations we have identified is introducing new sequence variants, they are all capable of altering gene dosage between homoeologs and also total gene dosage in the case of aneuploidies, deletions and duplications. These changes in gene copy number may result in expression differences and this in turn may result in significant phenotypic variation, as shown by aneuploid somaclonal variants that frequently originate from tissue culture and somatic embryogenesis. The genomic rearrangements may therefore represent an important source of genetic diversity that is continuously replenishing the very limited nucleotide diversity available within the species." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-44449-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-44449-8 I suppose the takeaway is that using functional gene sequences alone (a common approach in the pre-whole-genome sequenceing era) to determine genetic similarity misses a lot of important information.
- tobinfricke 3y agoYeah the subtitle kinda contradicts the title: "Flavour variations are mainly the result of changes at the chromosome level, sequencing effort finds."
- cortesoft 3y agoYeah, I mean technically people and coffee are genetically similar.
- bell-cot 3y agoWhen I was a kid, we had a pear tree growing in our yard. Yet the various foods which mom made from the pears varied greatly in taste. With the pears, it was visually obvious to the pear-pickers (us kids) that each pear was different, and that their character varied from year to year. (I'd guess based mostly on weather.) Similarly obvious how pears that were only cooked enough to start melting the ice cream scooped onto them would taste quite different from pears cooked down into jam, or pears that were caramelized in a fry pan (to be put on top of ice cream), or...
- oceanplexian 3y agoThis is IMHO, why companies like McDonalds or Budweiser are technically so impressive. A lot of people will criticize them for being crap or generic quality food and beverage products, but it takes a ridiculous amount of engineering to make a product that's consistent, at scale, all around the world. A family member used to work as an engineer at a large craft brewery and making a consistent product year-to-year was one of their biggest challenges and they didn't always get it right.
- apeters 3y agoYes, that’s impressive. I’m not eating fast food since years now and don’t want to defend their business, but I always thought that the fast food you get at a huge chain like McDonalds is probably the most thoroughly tested you can buy.
- efields 3y agoFlower farmer here. Without reading: terroir. All coffee is grown in soil and the soil around the world is different. All plants will grow if they get the right inputs (water/light/air/macros/micros), but how they grow and the makeup of their harvestable material is going to vary by the _amounts_ and _timing_ of those inputs. I'd expect the same harvesting and roasting techniques applied to beans sourced from opposite ends of the earth would perform differently.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- someonehere 3y agoI’ll add on to this. Grew up in a farming area in Central California. The variety of orange I eat from where I grew up tastes distinct the same variety grown in SoCal.
- anon84873628 3y ago"Terroir" as typically defined is a mythical concept introduced by feudal French wine makers to justify their price fixing schemes. We're really trying to avoid importing the term into the coffee industry since it has the effect of locking producers into "their terroir" instead of acknowledging all the variables they can control (through hard work that deserves compensation) to create high quality coffee. See Lucia Solis podcast for expert commentary. But yes, latitude, altitude, and all the other inputs make a difference (in addition to the genetic variation that does exist -- I mean no one is surprised that you can get different types of apples or organes?) But recent studies have also revealed the variations in microbial community present on coffee plants in different regions. And besides agronomy or roasting, coffee processing can have a huge effect on flavor. Fermenting the beans -- whether in whole cherry with or without oxygen, pulped in tanks with yeast or bacteria, or all the other things producers are experimenting with these days-- fermentation is like an enormous sound equalizer board for dialing up and down various flavors.
- efields 3y agoMarketers be marketing. I appreciate the insight. I think coffee people are on a higher level than wine people, FWIW. It is a _far_ more nuanced beverage.
- onetimeuse92304 3y agoAs an engineer and a lover of coffee with a barista certificate... * soil, * climate, * harvesting process (for example, you get different results if have somebody harvest by hand the ones that are ripe vs when you send a machine to harvest an entire side of a hill), * fermentation/preparation process, * roasting process, And that is before even you choose what you do with your beans. Any grinding, brewing method will produce potentially very different flavour profile because coffee brewing is notoriously sensitive to minute changes in grind sizes, grind size consistency, temperature, pressure, duration, level of flow of water through the grinds, etc. And then the question of how much you dilute the brew or what you add to it. You can get very different results from two different processes: a) make espresso into the cup, pour milk, add ice b) put ice into the cup, make espresso over the ice, pour milk onto it which is exact same ingredients, just a different order. You can get the coffee to taste very, very differently based on what you put in your mouth before you drink the coffee. Try drinking a sip of coffee, then put a piece of cake in your mouth, eat the piece, then make another sip of coffee. You will find the coffee now tastes completely different. The dimensionality of the space of all parameters is enormous.
- simonebrunozzi 3y agoI wish I could do an indoor vertical farm just for beans, to get them exactly the way I want them. I know, a single espresso would cost me maybe $5 if doing it this way, but it could be a nice hobby.
- whoopsie 3y agoYou just beat me to it. The headline author (on editorial side, not the researchers), sadly leans on the genes-are-all crutch and forgets entirely about the massive contribution of multiple fermentation steps.
- nerdponx 3y agoQuick ctrl-F reveals no mention of the word "grape" or "barley" in the article. Nobody is surprised that genetically-similar grapes grown in different regions and converted to wine using different processes taste different. Same goes for barley and beer, apples and cider, et al. Why should we be surprised at all that it also happens with coffee? Plus, small genetic differences can result in large physiological differences in the actual organism. Just look at broccoli and cauliflower, for example. Or domestic dogs, or humans.
- whoopsie 3y agoThe headline isn’t the original paper authors’ fault, rather the news side of the Nature editorial office. Sadly it leans on an all-to-prevalent crutch and oversimplification of the genetics field. A large component of coffee taste comes from processing after picking, which includes several fermentations. Massive flavor swings occur here, but are left unmentioned. Not everything is in genes . We don’t even need to discuss roast and brew chemistry.
- hackeraccount 3y agoBest example of this are the coats of cloned cats. Genetically identical but they look very different. Nature vs. Nurture is an old question but it's hard to appreciate the things that nurture encompasses that on the face might seem purely "Nature."
- alxjsn 3y agoDidn’t see it mentioned anywhere but this is a great espresso resource: https://espressoaf.com/ https://espressoaf.com/