Spotlight
It’s no secret that climate change poses a threat to our agricultural systems. Rising temperatures and changing rainfall patterns, as well as extreme weather events, are already stressing farms and jeopardizing the ability to grow certain crops in certain locations. Among the first casualties are likely to be delicate specialty crops like the tropical berries that make coffee, one of the world’s most beloved beverages.
However, as long as coffee has existed, alternatives to it have appeared one after another. And today, a new wave of startups is entering the coffee imitation game, motivated by the threat climate change poses to the world’s coffee supply.
“I was surprised at how many alternatives there are to coffee,” says Grist’s senior editor, who explored these alternatives, grouped under the banner “beanless coffee,” in last week’s feature article. LV Anderson said. “Almost every region of the world has a very strong tradition of making brewed beverages similar to coffee.”
Its tradition has often been driven by cost, offering cheaper options such as toasted barley and rye to the masses who can’t afford specialty items like coffee. And it’s also part of the calculus for today’s climate-focused startups, which are making coffee substitutes from readily available ingredients, including a variety of seeds, roots, seeds, grains, and legumes. is. As climate change threatens coffee production, the price of real coffee may rise, increasing demand for affordable alternatives.
But of course, for these alternatives to start gaining a foothold today, they need to be good.
When Anderson first started reporting on this story, “as someone who drinks coffee and loves coffee,” she was very skeptical of what these startups were offering. “I’m not a morning person. Coffee is really important to me to actually wake up and get ready for the day,” she said. But her editor encouraged her to approach the story with an open mind, which she did, even sampling a few of her beers.
As much as she enjoyed them, she was acutely aware that most of the time, they weren’t coffee. The rich, alluring aroma was gone, and the taste was “so slightly different that it was hard to pinpoint,” Anderson said. But, she added, she can get used to them herself if she wants.
The latte Anderson tried at Manhattan’s Gumption Coffee was made with ground bean lees from a company called Atomo. LV Anderson/Grist
While coffee is not the biggest culprit when it comes to agriculture’s climate impact (along with beef and dairy, two other products that have grown their own alternative markets), its production does require environmental protection. It costs a lot of money. And in many cases, these coffeeless coffee companies appeal to sustainability-conscious consumers by offering something they claim is more environmentally friendly. “I think almost all of these companies, at least most of them, make claims about how their products are deforestation-free,” Anderson said. At least a few startups are also turning to agricultural waste to make beer, helping to keep food waste out of landfills.
These companies may be hoping early adopters will make the switch based on this sustainability argument, but the bottom line is that these products are more climate-resistant than real coffee. Anderson said he’s betting that it will be something that coffee lovers will like. Anderson himself may eventually be willing to accommodate the ducks.
“You can’t predict what will happen in the future,” she added. “But I think this vision that non-bean coffee companies are selling for the future is plausible. It’s that coffee is going to be really popular. It will be difficult to access.”
In the excerpt below, Anderson explains how beanless coffee is actually brewed, as well as some of the many coffee alternatives on the market. See the full story on his Grist site.
— Claire Ellis Thompson
The best coffee for the planet may not be coffee itself (excerpt)
Arabica coffee, the most commonly grown plant species for drinking, has been likened to Goldilocks. Common in the highlands of tropical countries such as Guatemala, Ethiopia, and Indonesia, they thrive in shady environments with consistent, moderate rainfall and temperatures between 64 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Although coffee plantations can be sustainably integrated into tropical forests, growing coffee often leads to environmental damage. Coffee is one of the top six causes of deforestation in agriculture, as farmers cut down trees both to make room for coffee trees and to fuel the wood-fired dryers used to process the beans. Once all of the coffee plant’s detailed needs are met, it will produce harvestable beans after 3 to 5 years of growth, ultimately yielding 1 to 2 pounds of green coffee beans per year.
If Arabica is Goldilocks, climate change is an angry bear. For nearly 200 years, humans have been burning fossil fuels and pumping global warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The resulting floods, droughts, and heat waves, as well as the spread of climate-induced coffee borers and fungal infections, make much of today’s coffee growing area unsuitable for the crop, destroying coffee farmers’ production areas. It is predicted that Profit margins will fall and the global coffee market will be disrupted. That change is already underway. Due to extreme weather in Brazil, the price of coffee products hit an 11-year high of $2.58 per pound in 2022. And as coffee producers expand into new areas, more trees will be cut down, biodiversity threatened and more areas transformed. Forests absorb carbon from carbon sources.
Many times before, coffee has been out of reach for most people. So I found a cheaper alternative, albeit caffeine-free. Caro and other quaint ready-to-drink mixes, such as his Postum in the United States and caffè d’orzo in Italy, were made during and after World War II, when coffee was rationed, and for other reasons. It was popular during the years when it became difficult. But the practice of brewing decaffeinated ersatz coffee from other plants is even older than that. In the Middle East, people have been brewing hot, strong drinks using date palm seeds for hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years. In pre-Columbian Central America, the Mayans drank a similar drink made from the seeds of the Ramon tree found in the rainforest. In Europe and Western Asia, drinks are made from chicory, chickpeas, dandelion root, figs, grains, lupine beans, and soybeans. These ingredients have historically been more available than coffee and are sometimes thought to offer health benefits.
A 1902 illustrated advertisement for Postum by the Postum Cereal Company of Battle Creek, Michigan. Jay Paul/Getty Images
Today’s beanless coffee startups are putting a modern spin on these venerable low-tech coffee alternatives. Based in the Netherlands, Northern His Wonder makes products primarily from lupine beans (also known as lupini) and chickpeas and chicory. Seattle-based Atomo infuses date seeds with a proprietary marinade that produces “the same 28 compounds” as coffee, the company boasts. Singapore-based Prefer makes beer by microbially fermenting soy milk, leftover bread, and spent barley byproducts from breweries. Minus also uses fermentation to create coffee-like flavors from “upcycled seeds, roots, and seeds.” All of these brands add caffeine to at least a portion of their blends, with the goal of providing consumers with the same energizing effects as the real thing.
“We tried all the coffee alternatives,” said Maricel Saenz, CEO of Minus. “And what we realized is that they taste like coffee, but they end up tasting more like toasted grains than like coffee.”
In an attempt to explain what makes today’s beanless coffee different from old-fashioned coffee, Northern Wonder CEO David Klingen explains that he has mixed modern meat substitutes with more traditional options like tofu and tempeh. This is compared to the relationship with soybean products. Many plant-based meats contain soy, which is highly processed and combined with other ingredients to create a convincing meat-like texture and flavor. The same goes for beanless coffee compared to Karo-style grain drinks. Klingen said he and his colleagues mapped the properties of different ingredients (bitterness, sweetness, smokiness, ability to form a foam similar to the crema that adorns espresso shots) and tried to combine them in ways that would work. He emphasized that. -Coffee facsimile rounded up with added caffeine.
In contrast, traditional coffee alternatives like chicory and barley beer have no effect on caffeine addicts. Atomo, Minus, Northern Wonder, and Prefer promise daily fixes you can trust.
“Coffee is a ritual and a result,” said Andy Kreitsch, CEO of Atomo. “And that’s what we’re recreating.”
— LV Anderson
Read the full story here Learn more about how researchers and entrepreneurs are thinking about the future of coffee.
further exposure
see for yourself
Last week we celebrated the 100th issue of Looking Forward by launching a special occasion that we’re really looking forward to. drabble writing contest.
Thank you to the many people who have already submitted their drabbles! We love reading your vision for a clean, green, and just future. I’ve included the prompt again here for those who haven’t sunk in yet.
We’ve also heard from several of you that the email address included in last week’s newsletter is no longer being sent to. Thank you for the information. It should be fixed now.
***submit: Please send your drabble to lookforward@grist.org with “Drabble Contest” in the subject line by the end of Friday, April 26th.
The prompt is: Choose one climate solution that excites you and tell us how you hope it will evolve over the next 100 years to help build a clean, green, and just future. We’ve covered a ton of solutions (100 in fact!) that you can come up with. So if you need some inspiration, peruse the Looking Forward archives here.
Drabble offers a small glimpse into the future we dream of, so paint a compelling picture of how we would like the world and our lives in it to evolve.
Here’s what we’re looking for:
- Descriptions that allow you to immerse yourself in the scene and setting.
- sense of time. You don’t have to put a specific timestamp on your work, but give hints that we are about 100 years from now in the future (not an alternate reality) and that certain things have changed.
- That feeling. Is this episode about pleasure or frustration? excitement? Nervousness? Is it the mundane joy of living in a world where your needs are met? Make us feel something!
- 100 words on dots.
Drabble won It will be featured in the May issue of Looking Forward, and the winners will receive a gift! The rustic items and the book of your choice will be lovingly packaged and mailed by Claire.
parting shot
Another climate-friendly coffee company Anderson covered is Stem. The company is working to grow coffee bean cells in the lab, rather than creating bean-free imitations using more easily available materials. Like cell-based meat, this product must clear regulatory hurdles before it can reach the market. But unlike imitations made from roots and seeds, the resulting beer is chemically identical to the real thing. These three photos of him show stem coffee from Petri dish to pot.
