Your Coffee Is About to Change, Whether You’re Ready or Not

Salon loves their hyperbolic, click-bait headlines. This rage-bait shit is exhausting.

If they can make caffeinated chickpeas, I'll be having a Hummus breakfast more often.

If they are suggesting a decaf alternative, they should go back to figure out why coffee.

After coffee I'm just going to jump straight to the caffeine inhaler if we have to be cyberpunk about it.

I find it interesting that they glossed over the simplest solution, which would be switch to buying sustainable, shade-grown coffee thus forcing coffee plantations switch to it from market pressure. But I realize it’s not the main topic of the article and that has its own issues - how to make sure it really is sustainably shade-grown, for one.

But also, maybe this is my cynicism showing, did anyone else think these sustainable coffee-esque options wouldn’t stay sustainable if they became popular? Especially with something like annual crops, once other companies see there’s money to be made they’ll jump on the trend and now land (and forests) is being cleared for these crops.

I can definitely not drink coffee made from chickpeas.

It's certainly interesting that people are exploring other options for creating hot dark beverages that taste at least somewhat similar to coffee, but it's also entirely possible that synthesized caffeine makes its way into other beverages entirely. Obviously there's tea as a substitute, but there are also lots of soft drinks and energy drinks with caffeine.

So long as caffeine remains cheap, increasing price of coffee will likely be met with caffeinated substitutes that have nothing to do with the coffee plant.

Tldr climate apocalypse for the coffee plant might shift the market towards alternative plants. While technically true that coffee plantations will struggle in the coming years, this just means higher prices and worse average quality off the shelf.

A bit of nothing news, imho.

Coffee alternatives like rooibos are already here and the market is very resistant. Cheap coffee drinkers are irrationally attached to the bad taste they feel nostalgic for. Fancy coffee drinkers will absorb the higher costs without looking for alternatives. It’s only the tea-adventurous coffee drinkers that care about these innovations, usually due to caffeine consumption restrictions which is also a disputed market because decaf coffee quality is improving.

Not looking forward to it since I imagine these will be reminiscent of coffee rather than indistinguishable. But then if coffee is going to be that expensive, substitutes don't need to be as good as coffee, just more appealing than tea.

COVID fucked up my taste for coffee completely. I fear it will never return. 😭

Ok, this is the hedgemeister being really nutty here, but this makes me think of Planet of the Apes (the original, not the remakes), in which there's some sort of plague that kills off everyone's dogs and cats, but doesn't affect apes, who are then taken as pets instead. For some reason this causes them to evolve and take the place of humans as the dominant species. The law of unintended consequences! So along the same lines, if coffee beans go extinct, what if a synthetic alternative is created which accidentally makes humans telepathic, or better yet, removes their need for sleep? If there's a sci-fi story in there somewhere, please feel free to take it and run with it. As for me, I think it's time for a lie down . . .

coffee made from chickpeas

My son is allergic to most legumes, so I hope this doesn't become a thing.

During periods of short supply and/or increased coffee has been often been replaced or augmented by various other ingredients. For example:

... during the American Civil War, Louisianans looked to adding chicory root to their coffee when Union naval blockades cut off the port of New Orleans. With shipments coming to a halt, desperate New Orleanians looking for their coffee fix began mixing things with coffee to stretch out the supply. Acorns or beets (cafe de betterave) also did the trick. Though chicory alone is devoid of the alkaloid that gives you a caffeine buzz, the grounds taste similar and can be sold at a lower rate. -- source

I live in New Zealand, a place with a climate not too dissimilar to the UK though I'm told we see the sun more often.

A few years back we had our first commercial coffee growing operation set up.

You can buy it here.

That's about USD$33 for 180g (coffee is a drug so I assume sold in grams in the US?), so it's nothing short of "pretty fucking expensive", but still interesting (horrifying?) that a commercial coffee operation can work here.