IF YOU prefer decaffeinated coffee, there may soon be a tastier, entirely natural brand available. Brazilian investigators have discovered varieties of the most popular coffee plant from Ethiopia that don’t contain caffeine.
Decaffeinated coffee is expensive to make from normal coffee, and doesn’t taste as good, as solvents used to extract the caffeine also remove some flavour compounds. But now a team led by Paulo Mazzafera at the University of Campinas has discovered the first naturally decaffeinated varieties of the Coffea arabica plant.
“This species is responsible for more than 75 per cent of traded coffee,” Mazzafera says. His team believes the decaf plants lack functional…
