Budapest Post

Cum Deo pro Patria et Libertate
Budapest, Europe and world news

The coffee with zero air miles

The coffee with zero air miles

Climate impacts are decimating coffee crops in tropical regions. Might we be able to grow coffee in colder countries one day?

The plant growing in the corner of Roastworks Coffee Co started life as a cherry, wrapped in parchment. It was given as a gift by an Ethiopian coffee agent and planted by the Little family out of curiousity. When their coffee roasting business relocated from Finland to Devon in south-west England in the 90s, the sapling came too.

The 30-year-old plant did nothing for years, says Will Little, who now runs the company his parents started, "making me a second-generation coffee roaster", he jokes.

But the coffee plant (coffea) finally flowered, to the surprise of Little, a few years ago. "The buds smelled like jasmine or orange blossom," he says. Little wondered if it flowered because the plant had been moved into a slightly warmer spot in the office, or maybe it had just decided that it was time.

Enthused by the new blossoms, he started feeding the plant, which was growing in "ordinary potting compost and some sand", with regular gardeners' fertiliser. His reward: a handful of cherries, perhaps 50g, "which is hardly anything in beans", he says.

For the next few years, the plant produced a modest crop, until 2020 when there was a bumper harvest of cherries – almost 400g in total. Now Little had enough to work with. After removing their flesh, 400g of coffee cherries will produce about 50g of green beans, which is just sufficient to roast.

The smallest coffee roaster Little had at hand was a tiny sample roaster, normally used to roast 30-40g of beans so that a coffee seller can quickly sample their product. He split his beans into two 25g batches and roasted half.

When his team gathered around to sip their office-grown coffee (one cup of coffee needs about 12g of beans, so their harvest didn't stretch far), to Little's surprise, it tasted good. "The chance of it tasting like **** was 99%," he says. "It could have tasted like cardboard, but it wasn't just drinkable – it tasted okay." Little sent off the remaining beans to a YouTuber who was also pleasantly surprised by the quality and described it has having a nutty, chocolatey aroma and flavour, though lacking some of the citrus elements of pure Ethiopian coffee.

If all this sounds like a lot of trouble to go to for a cup of joe, consider the climate cost of this popular morning beverage. A daily cup of coffee produces more than 300g of CO2 equivalent (CO2e), totalling 116kg of CO2 over the course of a year (or slightly more than the emissions from driving 1,000 miles in an average car). One cup of tea per day produces about 9kg of CO2e each year – and even a daily glass of wine has less impact on the environment than coffee (113kg CO2e each year).

But while growing coffee in your own backyard might seem appealing, our Foodprint Calculator shows that the carbon emissions from transporting coffee are negligible compared to the other carbon costs involved in producing the drink. About 50% of the total emissions from coffee comes from farming the crop, 20% from waste products, 17% from converting land for use in agriculture. Could these costs be reduced by growing coffee at home?

Try BBC Future's Foodprint Calculator to see the emissions from your own diet.

While reducing transport costs will make a small difference, what matters most is how and where coffee is grown. As the climate continues to change, areas that once were highly productive are becoming less productive, and new areas for coffee production are popping up.

The most popular cultivar, the arabica (Coffea arabica), is particularly sensitive to climate change. Oriana Ovalle-Rivera, a consultant in tropical agroforestry, and her colleagues modelled predictions about future coffee growing areas based on current estimates of climate change and found that higher altitudes will become more suitable. Kenya and Ethiopia are projected to become even better coffee growing regions, but the area suitable for producing coffee in Brazil could decline by as much as 60% and by up to 90% in Nicaragua as they are at lower elevations. Coffee production might creep uphill, they suggest, moving into previously unfarmed land.

Jack Crocker, the roastery manager at Roastworks Coffee Co in Devon, UK, inspects his company's coffee plant covered in cherries


Altitude is key to quality coffee, says Little. "Coffee needs drier, cooler air like you get in the mountains," he says. Coffee grown at greater elevations is called "high-grown", and is widely considered to be better and fetches a higher price. Little says it is not because of the altitude itself, but the fact that coffee grown at greater altitudes ripens more slowly. The slower the growth, the denser the bean, and the tastier the product.

Little thinks that this slow ripening may have been what happened with his indoor coffee, possibly improving the taste. It just so happened that Little's office also provided some other key climatic conditions for coffee growth. "The average temperature for coffee growth is 19C," he says. "It's not like some tropical crops that need heat and humidity, so our office is about right. It never freezes, never falls below 19C in winter in the daytime: perfect for a coffee tree. In terms of humidity, the UK is about 60-80%. It's not perfect but it is not far off."

So a keen coffee grower might be in luck growing a plant indoors. But there are some things that will be near impossible to recreate, Little points out, like the volcanic soil that makes Ethiopian coffee so desirable. "There is a certain flavour imparted by the terroir," he says. "Putting it in Devon red soil doesn't mean it would be worse, but it won't be the same."

With increasing global temperatures, might we need to find new coffee varieties? It's a reasonable question to ask, says Helena Dove, who oversees the Kitchen Garden in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, UK, adding that if we want to find more climate-resilient crops, now is the time to start looking.

Those climate-resilient crops might come from heritage or wild varieties. Researchers recently rediscovered a species of coffee (Coffea stenophylla) that had not been seen in the wild since 1954, but was once regarded as a prized variety. Stenophylla thrives in Upper West Africa in temperatures on average 6-7C higher than the temperatures at which arabica normally grows. The robusta variety of coffee (Coffea robusta) is also adapted to grow in warmer temperatures but has an inferior flavour to stenophylla. Other wild varieties, like Coffea affinis might also have useful disease resistence properties that could hybridised, or cross-bred, with crops.

Finding useful properties in wild varieties to diversify the crop gene pool might make it easier to grow crops in colder countries, too.

Producing wine in a country like the UK might once have been thought of as a niche pursuit, but today there are more than 500 vineyards in Britain. An analysis from 2018 identified a further 33,700 hectares of land suitable for wine growing in the UK – an area larger than the Champagne region and on similar terrain.

As the climate warms, though, the need for colder climate grapes might change. While most British vineyards are on the south coast, the analysis suggests that the best wine-growing regions are now slightly further north in East Anglia. In the United States, wine production has expanded to northern states, such as Michigan, due to warmer temperatures.

Wine has historically been produced in colder climates, like Canada, though these tend to be "ice wines" which are intentionally left to freeze on the vine to produce a sweet dessert wine. But regular wine is now grown and produced in Sweden, too, and some Scottish and Irish producers are having a go, with limited success so far.

Dove says that to prepare for a point in time when the climate in the temperate regions might support coffee, we should start looking for cultivars with resilient properties now. It could be a pressing step considering 60% of wild coffee varieties, like Coffea Stenophylla, from which we might find a resilient variety, are threatened with extinction.

To make a coffee plant hardier for a temperate climate, trees can be grafted onto a root stock. In essence, the trunk and branches of a fruiting tree are cut at the base and stuck to the roots and lower parts of a plant that is better adapted to the native climate, says Dove. The hardy roots provide resilience to temperature, moisture and soil conditions, while the trunk and branches flower and fruit as desired.

This is a centuries-old practice that has allowed fruit growers to adapt trees for colder climates. This means exotic fruit such as peaches and apricots can now be grown in the UK. "At one point we could never grow [them]," says Dove. "The trees were hardy, but the buds would freeze in February and drop off."

Root grafting is a common practice with fruit trees like apples, cherries, plums, apricots and peaches, says Dove. Anyone wishing to graft their own coffee plant would first need to identify a suitable root stock. Coffee is part of the Rubiaceae family of flowering plants, which while most of the members are tropical, does contain some temperate varieties.

After temperature and soil have been considered, a grower will need to think about how to get the coffee plant to fruit. Unlike tea plants, which will quite comfortably grow in colder regions, coffee not only needs to grow, but it needs to produce cherries.

The areas suitable for growing coffee in Nicaragua could decline by up to 90% due to climate impacts, studies suggest


Some tropical crops can produce their fruits without the need for their native pollinators to fertilise them. These are called parthenocarpic plants – notable examples include cucumbers, bananas and pineapples. The resulting sterile fruit can lack seeds altogether, making some more pleasant to eat. A wild, fertilised banana or pineapple would be filled with little seeds and have a lot less edible flesh, for example.

But, some crops need to be fertilised. In the case of coffee, the bean is the product of fertilisation. Fortunately for home-growers, arabica plants can self-pollinate (but will produce more fruit if cross-pollinated by insects). So, the presence of a native pollinator is not essential.

Grafting has the added bonus that the root stock can kickstart flowering. The hormones that stimulate flowering and fruiting are found in the roots, so if a mature root stock is grafted to an immature tree, a grower can reduce some of the time spent waiting for a tree to mature (which, for a coffee plant growing in the right environment might be 3-5 years, rather than the 30 it took for Little's to mature indoors). This is very useful for commercial fruit producers.

So, with a little patience, the right conditions and some selective breeding, one might be able to grow coffee at home in temperate countries, but Little pauses to ask why. "Crumbs, there are amazing coffees in the world," he says. "What we could produce is nowhere close to the best from Colombia or East Africa."

Having toyed with the idea of growing British coffee commercially, he has settled on using his plant as an education tool. What does he recommend that you do with your handful of cherries each year?

"The best thing to do is to just eat them – they're full of antioxidants," he says. "And they'll leave you buzzing on a caffeine high."

AI Disclaimer: An advanced artificial intelligence (AI) system generated the content of this page on its own. This innovative technology conducts extensive research from a variety of reliable sources, performs rigorous fact-checking and verification, cleans up and balances biased or manipulated content, and presents a minimal factual summary that is just enough yet essential for you to function as an informed and educated citizen. Please keep in mind, however, that this system is an evolving technology, and as a result, the article may contain accidental inaccuracies or errors. We urge you to help us improve our site by reporting any inaccuracies you find using the "Contact Us" link at the bottom of this page. Your helpful feedback helps us improve our system and deliver more precise content. When you find an article of interest here, please look for the full and extensive coverage of this topic in traditional news sources, as they are written by professional journalists that we try to support, not replace. We appreciate your understanding and assistance.
Newsletter

Related Articles

0:00
0:00
Close
Trump Threatens Retaliatory Tariffs After EU Imposes €2.95 Billion Fine on Google
Tesla Board Proposes Unprecedented One-Trillion-Dollar Performance Package for Elon Musk
Gold Could Reach Nearly $5,000 if Fed Independence Is Undermined, Goldman Sachs Warns
Uruguay, Colombia and Paraguay Secure Places at 2026 World Cup
Trump Administration Advances Plans to Rebrand Pentagon as Department of War Instead of the Fake Term Department of Defense
Big Tech Executives Laud Trump at White House Dinner, Unveil Massive U.S. Investments
Tether Expands into Gold Sector with Profit-Driven Diversification
‘Looks Like a Wig’: Online Users Express Concern Over Kate Middleton
Florida’s Vaccine Revolution: DeSantis Declares War on Mandates
Trump’s New War – and the ‘Drug Tyrant’ Fearing Invasion: ‘1,200 Missiles Aimed at Us’
"The Situation Has Never Been This Bad": The Fall of PepsiCo
At the Parade in China: Laser Weapons, 'Eagle Strike,' and a Missile Capable of 'Striking Anywhere in the World'
The Fashion Designer Who Became an Italian Symbol: Giorgio Armani Has Died at 91
Putin Celebrates ‘Unprecedentedly High’ Ties with China as Gazprom Seals Power of Siberia-2 Deal
China Unveils New Weapons in Grand Military Parade as Xi Hosts Putin and Kim
Rapper Cardi B Cleared of Liability in Los Angeles Civil Assault Trial
Google Avoids Break-Up in U.S. Antitrust Case as Stocks Rise
Couple celebrates 80th wedding anniversary at assisted living facility in Lancaster
Information Warfare in the Age of AI: How Language Models Become Targets and Tools
The White House on LinkedIn Has Changed Their Profile Picture to Donald Trump
"Insulted the Prophet Muhammad": Woman Burned Alive by Angry Mob in Niger State, Nigeria
Trump Responds to Death Rumors – Announces 'Missile City'
Druzhba Pipeline Incident Sparks Geopolitical Tensions
Cost of Opposition Leader Péter Magyar's Economic Plan Revealed
Germany in Turmoil: Ukrainian Teenage Girl Pushed to Death by Illegal Iraqi Migrant
United Krack down on human rights: Graham Linehan Arrested at Heathrow Over Three X Posts, Hospitalised, Released on Bail with Posting Ban
Asian and Middle Eastern Investors Avoid US Markets
Ray Dalio Warns of US Shift to Autocracy
Eurozone Inflation Rises to 2.1% in August
Russia and China Sign New Gas Pipeline Deal
Von der Leyen's Plane Hit by Suspected Russian GPS Interference in an Incident Believed to Be Caused by Russia or by Pro-Peace or by Anti-Corruption European Activists
China's Robotics Industry Fuels Export Surge
Suntory Chairman Resigns After Police Probe
Gold Price Hits New All-Time Record
UK Fintechs Explore Buying US Banks
Greece Suspends 5% of Schools as Birth Rate Drops
Apollo to Launch $5 Billion Sports Investment Vehicle
Bolsonaro Trial Nears Close Amid US-Brazil Tension
European Banks Push for Lower Cross-Border Barriers
Poland's Offshore Wind Sector Attracts Investors
Budapest Central European Fashion Week Kicks Off
U.S. Celebrates Labor Day
Hungarian National Team Captain Scores Epic Goal
EU is getting aggressive: Four AfD Candidates Die Unexpectedly Ahead of North Rhine-Westphalia Local Elections
Japanese Customer Sways from VW to BYD after “Unbelievable” Test Drive amid Dealership Expansion
Nestlé Removes CEO Laurent Freixe Following Undisclosed Relationship with Subordinate
Pickles are the latest craze among Generation Z in the United States.
Giuliani Seriously Injured in Accident – Trump to Award Him the Presidential Medal of Freedom
Deadline Day Delivers Record £125m Isak Move and Donnarumma to City
Nvidia Reveals: Two Mystery Customers Account for About 40% of Revenue
×