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Coffee has a climate change problem. Arabica, which makes up more than half of what goes into the world’s coffee mugs, grows best from 18–22 °C and is thus vulnerable to rising temperatures. Robusta, while more amenable to warmer climates, is generally considered not to taste as good as Arabica, and it garners lower prices for farmers.
Now, a research team proposes that a species that hasn’t been commercially cultivated in a century could be a boon to the coffee industry. As the team reported yesterday (April 19) in Nature Plants, the species, stenophylla (Coffea stenophylla), grows at annual mean temperatures of up to about 24.9 ºC and tastes similar to Arabica.
Stenophylla has not been cultivated since the 1920s, with historical records indicating that it fell out of favor because of poor yields and competition with robusta, the authors write in their paper. It ...
