Coffee may disappear

(Coffee is a key ingredient in a lot of alcoholic beverages.)

I recently watched a two and a half hour long podcast on coffee. The podcast was the Joe Rogan Experience, with guest Paul Giuliano. It was very enlightening and I suggest you watch it if you have any interest in coffee at all.

See Also: Whistler episode of 'The Bottle Opener'

One of the topics Joe's guest brought up several times was the diversity of the coffee plant. Now in an episode of The Bottle Opener I briefly explained that coffee was from the Middle East. This is wrong. Coffee originates from Ethiopia, but centuries ago humans brought it across the Red Sea to Yemen, where it was shipped out to the rest of the world from the port of Mocha. Virtually all mainstream coffee is a derivative of these plants from Mocha, and make up one or two percent of the total diversity of the coffee plant.

(I predict that Sony Vaios and independent coffee shops will be the hipster's new Macbook and Starbucks.)

So where is the rest of the coffee? Well, its in Ethiopia of course. Each area of Ethiopia is said to have its own varieties of coffee which make up a piece of that town's cultural identity. The coffee is incredibly diverse, with Paul explaining on the podcast that he has brought coffee from Irgachefe, which has a noticeable lemon-like odour. Lemon isn't exactly a quality that you'd normally associate with coffee, and yet there it is; a real thing.

See Also: Sciue Melville

The incredible diversity of this incredibly important plant is something that we may lose some day. There's an ongoing effort to conserve these plants, like many other at risk plants. The reality is that coffee is at risk of disappearing in future generations because of global warming and deforestation. Ethiopia is a tropical country, in which coffee evolved as a shrub living under the canopies of much larger trees. As the world heats up and loses more forests,  the coffee plant loses more of its natural habitat. With up to ninety nine percent of the genetic diversity in one small area of a country, the remaining coffee plants could be devastated by just one bad virus.