• kadu@scribe.disroot.org
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    7 hours ago

    Brazil’s Embrapa is trying to breed Robusta to have a taste profile more closely matching Arabica, whilst also resisting the heat better.

    • tiramichu@sh.itjust.works
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      7 hours ago

      This is gonna be like the Gros Michel banana thing again isn’t it - where decades from now almost none of the world’s coffee will taste as good as it used to, and nobody quite knows why.

      • Axolotl@feddit.it
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        5 hours ago

        I doubt because in that case we do have seeds of the plant and it can be put in a greenhouse, generally the situation is way different, i’il explain myself better:

        Gran michele is now extinct because of how it was cultivated; In practice, to avoid having seeds in the fruit, production was carried out using cuttings, so practically all Gran Michele plants were clones of a group of other Gran Michele plants, meaning that genetic mutations never developed. Since none of them had developed a mutation capable of resisting a fungus (the name of which I cannot remember), they ALL died and we simply didn’t had seeds

        • tiramichu@sh.itjust.works
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          4 hours ago

          You can still buy the Gros Michel banana nowadays. It’s not extinct, but is a rare and expensive speciality, rather than the common type of banana we see on the shelves like it used to be.

          If climate change makes growing Arabica coffee commercially non-viable at scale and all the growers move to hardier alternatives, then Arabica will still exist, but will also become a rare and expensive speciality, just like the banana.

          • arrow74@lemmy.zip
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            2 hours ago

            Wow that’s gone up me and a few coworkers ordered a box a couple of years ago and it was like $9 per banana.

            They were good, I see the appeal of the variety, but they were not $9 banana good. Let alone $37 banana good.

    • DivineDev@piefed.social
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      6 hours ago

      Robusta tastes like burnt rubber

      I will not accept this baseless slander! Vietnamese coffee (which is basically always robusta) mixed with sweetened condensed milk is the best coffee known to man and I will allow no different opinion.

      • kadu@scribe.disroot.org
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        6 hours ago

        with sweetened condensed milk

        To be fair, it’s almost impossible to screw up condensed milk, it always tastes good.

      • shininghero@pawb.social
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        6 hours ago

        I’ve had a couple good roubustas, but it is a fickle breed to roast. If done wrong, even a medium roast will come out tasting like Folger’s. Moderately higher quality Folger’s due to the freshness, of course, but still Folger’s.

    • SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca
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      6 hours ago

      The taste profile comes from warm sunny days and cool nights. That cycle is critical and why the best coffee comes from subtropical mountain regions.