Coffee Rust | Hacker News Reader

Coffee Rust

theatlantic.com

121 points_Microft49 comments

Coming soon, good synthetic coffee.[1] Made from agricultural waste, to be sold at premium prices at first. The process is not inherently expensive, so, like the Impossible Burger, it will move down from the high end to Burger King.

[1] https://atomocoffee.com/

The picture of the coffee they are pouring on that page appears quite watery.

>> appears quite watery.

Particularly watery looking for a cold brew

The stuff in the lab pic looks closer to normal.

I don't know if you're affiliated with them, but I gave a brief look all over the website and couldn't find any indication of "coming soon." The only thing that says "coming soon" is your comment.

Website design and marketing aren't my area of expertise, but I think they'll lose a lot of eyeballs by advertising a product and don't either tell people where to buy it or if the product isn't released yet. Right now the website looks like an elaborate prank or a fake product. It would be fine if gathering interest/customers weren't the point of the website, but if it were about gaining investors then I think it should have other information (cost of production, scalability, market size, etc.).

They clam a $9M investment from Horizons Ventures (Hong Kong) and S2G Ventures. They started as a $25K Kickstarter.[1] CNBC says they had a taste test.[2] It might not work, and they're a year behind schedule, but there is reported activity.

It's a lot like synthetic wine. It's possible to analyze wine with a gas chromatograph to a level of detail that allows duplication. That's what "Gemello" is.[3] That's available now.

The coffee business has an advantage. Synthetic wine can't be sold as "wine" in the US. But synthetic coffee can be sold as coffee.

[1] https://news.yahoo.com/atomo-raises-9-million-bring-12000012...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/16/atomo-a-seattle-start-up-is-...

[3] https://www.sfchronicle.com/wine/article/San-Francisco-start...

I don't have any investment in them. If your agricultural product is just a flavored liquid, though, you're really vulnerable to synthesis and replacement. Look what happened to milk when the soy milk people finally figured out how to market.[1] (The dairy industry has frantically pivoted to cheese-with-everything as a strategy. It's not working.)

Wine still has the wine snob thing going for it. Plus regulation that prevents calling synthetic wine "wine". Coffee, though - that's vulnerable to replacement.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/13/5-charts-that-show-how-milk-...

Everything old is new again: in the former Eastern Bloc (and I think South Africa, too) chicory was drank as a substitute for coffee. Personally, I find coffee substitute and the often-burnt filter coffee favoured in North America or some of the Nordic countries to both be less than subtle and refined taste-wise, so sure, why not just cut real coffee out of the equation entirely?

'But now the fungicides were no longer working as they had. “La roya does not respect them,” Gabriel told me through a translator. One day, with no warning, the golden dots bloomed on a few leaves on a single plant. Gabriel sprayed them, and sprayed again, but the spots widened, then turned dark and dry and cracked through the middle. The leaves crisped, curling at the edges, and fell from the plant when breezes jostled them. The dust, the fungal spores, drifted across the field and infected another bush, or fell to the ground and splashed onto the next plant when rain fell. The cycle of slow plant death began again.'

I did not know that I would see the vision of Miyazaki expressed in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind realized in my lifetime.

"From 2012 to 2017, rust caused more than $3 billion in damage and lost profits and forced almost 2 million farmers off their land."

I can't jibe these numbers. That's only $1,500 per farmer.

“ The World Bank 2010 data for Guatemala indicates that the Gross National Income (GNI) Per Capita for Guatemala is $2,740 and for the Lower Middle class the average annual income is $1,619 in US dollars.” - http://www.terraexperience.com/guatemala_minimum_wage.htm (primary source 404)

The most interesting part to me was that the British didn’t always drink that much tea.

Is it possible to add more genetic diversity to coffee? Might taste better too

There's quite a lot of diversity in coffee already. Coffees from different regions taste wildly different. Climate change is just ravaging the coffee band. Ethiopian coffee will likely be gone in a couple decades as the growing region is pushed north into the Ethiopian highlands where it can't be grown since the highlands are actually huge pillars of rock rather than highlands as people typically understand them.

It's a shame, really, because Ethiopian coffee is absolutely wonderful.

How much of the Ethiopian economy is made up of coffee exports?

34%

(Google has become worse for long tail search queries, but interestingly now has an 'answer box' for wide ranging questions like this one.)

Be careful with those answer boxes, they don't always answer the question you want to know. It seems that coffee is 34% of Ethiopian exports, not their economy

Please don't blindly trust those answer boxes. One example of an answer that looks simple and definitive but was actually way off: https://youtu.be/TbHBHhZOglw?t=58

I hope it does not go away, one of my favorite types of beans for sure!

Most people drink coffee blends rather than single-origin. And in the U.S. at least dark roast coffee is very popular. Once the beans have been roasted that much the subtler coffee flavors are going to mostly disappear and it won't matter what sort of coffee it is.

How coffee is prepared generally has a much greater impact on flavor than the varietal - when very lightly roasted it has a flavor profile closer to a tea than what we generally think of as coffee.

Most people are unfamiliar with existing diversity of coffees from around the world. A lot of that is due to the economics of the coffee industry and the desire for consistency in flavor. Sure, maybe we could add more genetic diversity, but it's unlikely to change how the coffee you'd buy at the supermarket or a cafe chain will taste.

Arabica is the most common variety of coffee. There is another species, Robusta, that is far less delicious (if you’ve had Vietnamese coffee without the condensed milk, that’s often robusta) and is resistant to coffee rust. It also contains more caffeine. There are groups trying to make hybrids between them which is actually what I suspect is happening in this article.

There is also Liberica, or Liberian coffee, which saved the Indonesian coffee industry in the late 19th century, when their Arabica plantations collapsed due to coffee rust.

I swore this was going to be about some CoffeeScript + Rust monstrosity

Hmm. Some folks have hacked the Rust macro system to get whitespace-sensitivity for embedded Python. https://blog.m-ou.se/writing-python-inside-rust-1/ I wonder how much of the CoffeeScript syntax you could pack in there...

Consolation prize: the Rust programming language was named after the rust fungi. https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/27jvdt/internet_archa...

Because it destroys Java?

Nice pun. But I think Java will have a bright future with Project Loom coming.

It's always nice to take a break, relax, have a glass of water and not think about programming languages, especially on a Saturday.

Time to recalibrate the language confirmation bias and reset the adrenaline in you when your favourite language reaches top of Hacker News.

As soon as I saw the source of the article, I knew it was not going to be about coding.

OOPs. Java leaves + Rust.

The entire coffee-naming scheme of software products is imho really the most unimaginative marketing thing that ever happened in computing.

I was thinking the same.

Luckily we have technology such as greenhouses that means this is ultimately a cost issue and not an extinction level issue.

There is absolutely no way that greenhouse grown coffee is viable from a cost perspective.

Unaffordable coffee is essentially equivalent to no coffee for 98% of the population.

Coffee grows best in outdoor elevated tropical climates. Similar to cacao, putting a roof over an entire hillside is simply not feasible for even the wealthiest farmers.

One of the foundations of most farming is that given a large are, you can just place the plants and care for the ground they're on, and handle pests that can be seen. That's manageable with lots of farm labor and with available building material. Building a glass louvre around every rural farm between the tropics of cancer and capricorn, replacing the wind and rain, etc is just not how rural third world farming works.

Well that still sounds like a cost issue to be honest, worst case is that coffee becomes a luxury item again. Though practically as third world companies develop and greenhouses become cheaper it probably wouldn’t climb so high as to stop being sold by the major retailers, Costco, etc. Double or triple in price maybe.

Unfortunately "luxury" doesn't seem like the likely outcome here. Luxury items are created via artificial scarcity (e.g. diamonds) or just by high cost of expertise and goods (e.g. a luxury car). In order for food to become a luxury item, it needs to be a more costly variation on something which is more readily available. This allows for a constant demand, with a side business in exotic expensive extras.

If coffee, globally, needed to be grown in greenhouses it would just become a novelty tree that school trips visited until the climate turned around and it became an economically viable crop again.

Coffee is space inefficient and (cheap) labor intensive to produce. Greenhouses wouldn't be viable.

Check out this video to get a sense of what goes into producing the beans we all consume. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCCILcuWChM

Maybe it's time for hipsters to make WW2-era coffee substitutes like chicory and acorns fashionable again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_substitute

https://www.victorycoffees.com

Not sure if duckspeak =.= or duckspeak.

Edit for sauce: http://www.george-orwell.org/1984/4.html

Those appear to be actual coffee?

Chicory coffee remains popular in New Orleans, but they usually blend in actual coffee for the caffeine kick: https://www.neworleansroast.com/chicory/

I think in practice it's the opposite - they brew actual coffee and blend in chicory for the authentic New Orleans taste kick.

Caro Coffee is also not bad. Make sure to not use too much of it per drink, as it can taste bitter if it's too concentrated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caro_(drink)

The hipsters came for chicory about 5-10 years ago.

I upvoted mechanically without opening the link because that's what I do when I see an entry about Rust.

I'm joking, I did not do that, but it's possible explanation how this link got to the first page of HN.

Orange crab good, Apple bad.

Or, perhaps, because the content is interesting?

Perhaps. But if title didn’t have the word a Rust, fewer people would clicked.

Considering how much of dev is powered by coffee, this is a deeply concerning post.

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