Coffee of the Future: Roasted Directly in a Petri Dish

The current “issue” with coffee is that it contributes directly to global warming: as the world’s consumption increases, part of the Earth’s “lungs” is being turned into agricultural land; add to that the problems for traditional coffee plants (arabica and robusta) when it comes to adapting to global warming, and it may be that we are going to see the return of the famous “chicory coffee” of lean years, when that cheap substitute was all that could keep the sacrosanct ritual alive… That is, if you discount the determination of Finnish researchers (Finland is thought to be the world’s biggest consumer of coffee). They have developed a kind of “cellular” coffee, which can reproduce “natural-seeming” coffee, with the enormous advantage of being already ground: the powder thus produced is then roasted and prepared like real coffee.

It is still in development, but Finnish tasters are being sought to offer their opinions on the “flavour” of this strain of coffee. It’s almost an in vitro coffee, like the lab-grown meat that’s already being sold in Singapore and which may soon replace traditional methods of production.