Chef Keven Evan Lee of the Sherbourne Restaurant in Hollywood, California was recently interviewed by the Los Angeles Times. When asked about his favorite breakfast, he replied:

“My favorite breakfast is from the time that I lived in Costa Rica. Waking up to the sounds of the ocean crashing and walking into my kitchen for a plate that consisted of freshly boiled beans with thyme and cilantro folded into steamed rice, two over-medium eggs, queso fresco, a piece of salchichon and not to forget, a piece of freshly fried plantain. Then, a traditional coffee setup, pouring freshly ground Costa Rican coffee beans held by a harness with a cup below, and with the other hand, pouring hot water while twisting and turning the sock-like sieve to extract the wonderful flavors of Costa Rica into my cup. Just thinking about it brings me back.”

Sound very enticing, right? But what if the coffee the chef described, fresh from the chorreador, was decaf? Would the breakfast experience be the same? Probably not, which is why scientists are looking into the matter.

According to the international scientific weekly journal Nature, the nearly insipid decaffeinated coffee consumed by millions of people each day is getting a boost in flavor thanks to a process of bioengineering that started in Costa Rica decades ago.

The Chemical Decaf Process

The commercial process of extracting caffeine from the precious coffee beans has been around since the 18^th century. It is a chemical affair, and today the process involves picking green coffee beans and dunking them into huge vats of liquid carbon dioxide. A similar result can be achieved by letting the beans soak in hot water for many hours prior to roasting. Either way, the effect is the same: caffeine is removed along with the signature taste and aroma.

Coffee growers have been manipulating their plants to improve the yield and efficiency of their crops and harvests for centuries. The decaf market is estimated at $2 billion per year, a figure that long ago prompted researchers to begin looking for ways to come up with a decaf bean that could be grown and picked without sacrificing the all-important flavor and scent.

Hybrid Decaf Plants

During a 1964 United Nations expedition to the African nations of Eritrea and Ethiopia, several plants of the Coffea arabica species were collected and brought to Costa Rica. Paulo Mazzafera, a researcher at the University of Campinas in Brazil, tracked down the plant lineages grown in Costa Rica and sent to his South American country. Mazzafera has been researching coffee genetics since the 1980s, and at some point he found beans that were naturally low in caffeine -but that lacked the flavor characteristics of the arabica grown in Costa Rica.

Mazzafera continued his research and in 2003 he found that out of the 308 plants that were grown in Costa Rica and originated in Ethiopia, a few were defective. Some of these arabica plants failed to produce caffeine, yet retained all other characteristics. By cross breeding these plants with others, Mazzafera hopes to produce a natural decaf strain that can be massively farmed.

Coffee as a Genetically-Modified Organism (GMO)

While Mazzafera takes the very slow and “shot-in-the-dark” approach to cross breeding and cultivating hybrids, researchers in Hawaii have resorted to biotechnology to come up with a decaf GMO. These researchers worked at the seed level, but once they were confident that they had achieved success, the young transgenic plants would revert to their old caffeine-rich versions.

Eventually, the research team succumbed to pressure from members of the Hawaiian community who did not want testing of transgenic species on the soil of their beloved islands and closed the operation.

The Future of Natural Decaf Plants

Back in Brazil, the research project conducted by Mazzafera is yielding caffeine-free arabica plants -at a very slow and laborious rate. Bernadete Silvarolla is Mazzafera’s research partner, and she is in charge of the painful manual pollination process, which yields about 800 plants per year.

Cross-pollination is a major threat to their project, something that any bird, bee, or butterfly can easily cause without notice. When this happens, the pesky caffeine returns to the plant and therefore to the coffee beans. The search for a naturally-grown and commercially-viable decaf coffee bean continues, but in the meantime decaf lovers are stuck with drinking vapid coffee.

You can learn more about coffee in Costa Rica in our articles about The Art of Cupping and The Economics of Organic Coffee.