Sustainable coffee grown in Finland with cellular agriculture | Hacker News Reader

Sustainable coffee grown in Finland with cellular agriculture

vttresearch.com

161 pointsmjul86 comments

Big if true. Coffee is one of the world's most traded commodities by value, and the sourcing ethics are often pretty shaky.

I think it's sort of funny that they called out the flavor as tasting like "ordinary coffee," since people in my experience are extremely fussy about their brew.

By using bioreactor output, they're starting with something like a powder of plant cells, and finding a way to roast it -- this seems like it would create quite a different result to whole-bean roasting, I am very curious what kind of parameters they will have to adjust with the coffee cells (genetic modification to increase certain alkaloids, oils, etc?) and roasting process.

edit: I think it's extremely funny that my comment about people being fussy about coffee has inspired a whole series of replies with opinions about coffee, as well as opinions of other people's opinions

> since people in my experience are extremely fussy about their brew

Finns drink the most coffee per capita in the world [1] but that coffee tends to be of a pretty low quality. For some people "good coffee" means it has been roasted so dark that it mostly tastes bitter and burnt. Other people don't really care what the coffee tastes like, as long as it's black (and they put so much milk in it that it mostly tastes of milk) and warm-ish. So it is entirely possible the scientists conducting this experiments aren't the best at judging the actual quality of the coffee.

[1] https://www.universitymagazine.ca/countries-that-consume-the...

Traditionally Finns love coffee that is extremely lightly roasted, and is the finest quality (and highest caffeine content). You don't find the preference for so light roasts anywhere else.

The bulk blend that Finns consume in large quantities "Paulig Juhla Mokka" is made from high quality beans.

Young people have started drinking more dark roasted blends, similar to coffees in Sweden and rest of the Europe. Swedish coffee taste is completely different. Dark roast all over.

> Traditionally Finns love coffee that is extremely lightly roasted

No, not really. It's called light roast here, but my understanding is that compared to actual light roasts (e.g speciality coffees from smaller roasters) most coffees tend be actually closer to medium or even dark roasts. Good quality light roasts taste of their origin characteristics (coffee from different places tends to taste different, who would've guessed) and they are closer to acidic than bitter.

Normal light roasted juhlamokka is maybe a 2/5 roast, medium roast tends to start at 3/5.

When roasting coffee, they're of course graded visually but there are two important bench marks: first and second crack.

If you don't roast your coffee beyond the first crack, it's essentially still raw and unsuitable for drinking.

Second crack happens later in the roast process if you keep roasting it, usually medium coffee is taken out before the second crack as it tends to get noticeably darker and more oily aftrr that point. A dark roast (4/5) is after the second crack as well is a parisian roast (5/5), which is essentially burnt charcoal in my opinion.

About the Finnish coffee habits, I think it's true that historically we've mostly drunk lighter roasts and it has started to shift somewhat to darker roasts.

There are still a lot of people who prefer lighter roasts but I wouldn't clump them together by age group.

Personally, I'm of the opinion that the more you roast the beans, the more you can only taste roast level and less off the actual coffee. Some coffees might reach their peak at a lighter roast, some at medium but it's all downhill after that imo.

Thats not to say that darker roasts are inferior, if that's what you prefer. But if you buy expensive beans, you'll usually get a wider range of flavors out of lighter roasts.

I think the reason Finns have moved a bit towards darker roasts is simply the fact that it's not what we're used to drinking and it seems "better" or more exotic to us. A reverse shift has happened in countries where darker roasts have been prevalent, for similar reasons.

If you compare the normal market offerings in Finland to neighboring countries, you'll find that even the bulk juhlamokka is pretty good in comparison.

I've never been a fan of robust blends in general and Paulig for example has done a pretty good job at keeping their offerings consistent over decades even. Obviously they hold no candle against 3rd wave coffee but it's not exactly bitter tar we're drinking either.

Heh. I think you go little carried out with you coffee enthusiasm.

It's called light roast here and everywhere. I challenge you to find any place on earth where normal people (not coffee connoisseurs) drink lighter roast.

I'm not claiming that people of any nation in particular drink lighter roasted coffee, or even that Finland is exceptional in this regard. It's not a competition. I'm arguing that on the whole spectrum of coffee roasting, even Finnish supposedly light roasted coffee is not very light at all.

The bulk blend that Finns consume in large quantities "Paulig Juhla Mokka" is made from high quality beans.

I looked it up. Looks like typical super market coffee to me. Some of the big roasters produce a fairly decent blend. They use good quality arabica. These guys are probably no exception.

I've had the opportunity to get bags of coffee of a couple of brands with a recent roast date. Within a one to two weeks. Perfectly good. But get those beans through normal supermarket supply chains and it doesn't matter how good the coffee was, it'll be stale and taste bad by the time you brew it. Even worse if the beans are pre-ground and vacuum packed into bricks. I'd rather drink instant.

Yes. It's bulk coffee and cheap, not even close to best coffees you can get vacuum packed.

It's still better than most bulk coffee you get from most other super markets from the rest of the world.

The roast date is the important differentiator. Coffee from major brands (such as the aforementioned Paulig) do not include it. Rather, they have a best before date, which can be literally years after the roasting. But I guess the coffee can't get much worse after, as you said, being pre-ground and vacuum packed into a brick.

“ and is the finest quality (and highest caffeine content).” If is of the finest quality, means is arabica or other sort, which do not have the highest caffeine. Robusta type, which is cheaper to produce, has double the caffeine, (one of the reasons resist bugs) . Robusta has typically all the unwanted flavours of coffee, earthy & rubberish. Italians have traditionally added robusta to their blend for expresso shots because of the extra smack they get from the added caffeine (and probably to save money/make more money, this is my opinion)

It’s not just the caffeine; Robusta and Arabica have different amounts of other psychoactives.

”Norharman and harman are formed during coffee roasting, and Robusta coffee has higher amounts than Arabica.”

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978012409...

Robusta will produce a nicer crema on espresso, too.

Finns "love" light roasts because they're accustomed to it (except many of younger generations) and why they're accustomed is supposedly because a long time ago coffee was expensive and if you roasted it only a little you would obtain more coffee when measured in plain volume―with no regard to the actual taste.

I don't know how much of that is true but most typical Finnish blends are light, bland, and bitter (eventhough they're marketed as smooth...) but also cheap. The labels calling brands "finest quality" in Finland is a very relative matter: for decades the "finest" was probably something that any country with a hint of a coffee culture would've called crap.

I also don't know if I'm young enough but I've always like dark roasts so the general kind doesn't even taste like coffee in my mouth. Even as recently as maybe 20 years ago there were only one or two semi-dark roasts on the market: the situation has improved remarkably, however.

Juhla Mokka is mediocre quality, cheap coffee.

>and is the finest quality (and highest caffeine content).

Robusta has the highest caffeine content but is generally inferior to arabica.

Since coffee contains a large amount of MAOA inhibitors, the difference in taste preference can be explained by different MAOA variable number tandem repeat genotypes in the population. From these, MAOA-LPR is the most widely studied, and has been shown to be connected to criminality and violent behavior—especially if paired with childhood maltreatment, which tends to change the activity of MAOA by methylation, which is a type of heritable epigenetic modification.

What exactly does that mean?

Which part? It’s very difficult to be both exact and explain neurotransmitter systems in layman’s terms.

You can take any of the terms used above, even whole sentences, and enter them into Google to find further information around the subject.

The last part of your comment stated that coffee drinking can reduce criminality in certain genotypes? If not, could you rephrase it?

What they said was that people who exhibit criminal behavior (especially those who were maltreated as children) have a different experience tasting coffee. I don't see any claim that drinking coffee reduces criminality.

@eurasiantiger stated that studies show that MAOA-LPR has been shown to be connected [positively?] to criminality and violent behavior. I would expect that when @eurasiantiger specifically links that to MAOA inhibitors found in coffee, that means there is a linkage between coffee inhibiting MAOA and criminality in certain genotypes.

It was simply an expansion of that particular gene variant, but yes, I would assume there is a correlation between coffee intake and impulsive crime in some genetically predisposed subpopulations, but I cannot say whether it is linear, nonlinear or perhaps inverse.

What I can definitely tell you is that there is a positive correlation between heavy coffee intake (>= 8 cups per day) and suicidality. I assume that is the result of the anxiogenic and impulsivity-increasing actions of particular Harmala alkaloids, namely harman and norharman.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1007614714579

Coffee consumption can increase can increase ADD symptoms, no idea why though. L-Theanin from green tea can work in the opposite direction.

Yes, but the effect on coffee drinking preferences is not limited to those engaging in crime: plenty of ”normal” people have these gene variants, and it’s likely the criminal outcomes don’t manifest at all without childhood abuse, or they manifest in non-violent ways, e.g. white-collar crime or substance abuse.

So basically what you're saying that people's preference for different types of coffee depend on their genes?

Yes.

I think it's because coffee is counterintuitive. People assume a darker roast means stronger coffee (caffeine-wise) when it's the opposite.

But it might actually be stronger coffee MAOI-wise.

Yep. It's just feeding the addiction. We're a nation of drug addicts.

Funnily enough, mention the prospect of legal cannabis and everybody goes berserk.

Coffee won’t give you lung cancer.

Neither will cannabis. The consumption method is fully up to user choice and in areas where it's legalized edibles are commonplace.

What percentage of cannabis users do you estimate are smokers? I'd guess 70%, but I'm not a user.

The trend is deeply the opposite. Most young people don’t smoke or use tobacco but increasingly do marijuana in one form or the other.

I mean cannabis smokers. Tobacco is not under discussion here.

Typically calling someone a smoker implies tobacco, and in the past that was a strong correlation.

I apologize for the error. Do you have an answer to the question?

It will if you smoke it.

I've started to move from pre-ground Paulig (finnish brand) to grinding my own beans. Just while reading this post, drinking the left-over Paulig made me wonder if I have COVID. Very little smell and taste compared to freshly ground Italian beans, made even worse by the oxidation.

I'm not sure if you were serious, but losing your sense of smell due to COVID-19 is like turning off a light with a light switch -- it was everything, all at once, at least for me.

I started drinking coffee only in Mexico. It tasted less bitter than Finnish coffee and did not cause stomach problems. I do not remember the brand, but "ESTO SUAVE" was the blurb.

> I think it's sort of funny that they called out the flavor as tasting like "ordinary coffee," since people in my experience are extremely fussy about their brew.

The average coffee drinker in Finland isn't really a coffee snob. Mostly everyone just drinks the same handful of brands of pre-ground coffee, drip brewed through a paper filter. You go to a restaurant or a little bakery-cafe, you get the same stuff. Not labeled, no choices to make, but everyone knows what it is. It's just ordinary coffee.

I mean, they said it “bears a similarity to ordinary coffee”, which is pretty broad language, if you ask me.

“Similar to ordinary coffee”

"He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike [coffee]."

Are people that fuzzy? Of course I know my share of people that really obsess over it, own all the gear and everything in the process is strictly weighted, timed and temperature controlled.

But most people seem to primarily care about it tasting as they are used to whatever level of quality that might be. So making a coffee that tastes “ordinary” seems a sensible target.

> this project has been part of our overall endeavor to develop the biotechnological production of daily and familiar commodities that are conventionally produced by agriculture.

I'm afraid I have to call BS. The nutrient medium used to feed the cell cultures will contain glucose or sucrose most likely from industrially-grown corn or sugarcane as a carbon source and other nutrients.

I.e. in this case biotech isn't getting rid of an agricultural production process and magically replacing it with something sustainable - it's simply shifting the agricultural supply chain more upstream and out of view.

Could it still be more sustainable compared to traditional coffee growing? I doubt it very much given all the input required to run commercial-scale bioreactors. Those things are energy intensive, produce waste water, and require complex nutrient broths and sterility. If you're claiming sustainability benefits in such a fuzzy situation, at least have an LCA to back up the claims.

What about commercial feasibility? Extremely unlikely. Most if not all of the dealbreakers recently outlined in the context of commercial-scale lab-grown meat will apply here too [0].

But perhaps they can bioengineer some novel coffee characteristics unobtainable otherwise and sell it for $500 a cup.

[0] https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-sca...

The PRL-4 media referenced is mostly the same macro and micronutrients that all plants need plus a small amount of sucrose (30 g/L) with 10% coconut milk added.

Unfortunately, small amount of sugar = even smaller amount of useful product. I.e. for all we know the yields/cell densities (not reported) are so low that you need more land to grow sugarcane and coconut trees than to grow the amount of coffea plants needed for a similar amount coffee.

European sugar is from sugarbeet.

I know nothing of agriculture but I would think corn is much more sustainable than coffee beans. So it’s a step in the right direction at least, isn’t it?

Looking corn farming's environmental impact in the US (eutrophication & Gulf of Mexico deadzone, top soil erosion, biodiversity losses), I wouldn't be so sure.

You have to laugh at the obligatory time-to-market estimates in these lab-grown food articles: "I estimate we are only four years away from ramping up production and having regulatory approval in place."

It would be interesting to see what estimate was provided in the 1974 article referenced in the piece.

Not only the science may be the barrier, but also lobbyists - if coffee plantations start paying for spreading ill rumours aka you'll grow 3rd leg from lab coffee etc.

I've recently started making dandelion coffee, which is prepared by chopping up the roots and roasting them. It tastes similar to coffee. It has nutty, roasty and flowery flavors. I'd say it's less complex than a quality roasted coffee, but it has a nice flavor. It doesn't have any unpleasant flavor like really cheap coffees (Maxwell House, Chase and Sanborn, Folgers, etc). I think if you gave most people this and told them it was coffee, they wouldn't argue with you.

I don't think that growing coffee from cells will be scalable. It suffers the same problems that the cultured meat industry suffers.

Ultimately, the most cost-effective (energy and scalability-wise) production method is synthesizing the aromatic molecules directly without going through cell cultures.

There a very different techniques of cell culture. For cultured meat for example, the texture is very important which makes it expensive as you have to grow large groups of cells. If that is not necessary here, it will be much cheaper.

An example: Quorn, grown in bioreactors since 1985. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorn

Animal cells are very hard to keep alive since they are used to having blood and oxygen constantly pumping, that makes them expensive to farm. Plant cells on the other hand are very robust and survives harsh conditions, they are way cheaper to cultivate.

So if anything is worth artificial cultivation like this, it is plants like Coffee where the part we eat is a very small part of the whole plant. Then we can skip the rest of the coffee plant and just grow the beans.

The paper referenced was written in 1974 and concludes with "The typical aromatic characteristics of roasted coffee can be obtained from roasted coffee cells which have been derived from cultures maintained in active culture at least one year. Cell populations eventually appear to lose their ability to produce coffee precursors. The reason for this coffee culture roasting aroma instability is unknown although one obvious explanation could be cell selection from an initial possible heterogeneous cell population..."

I wonder what changes have been made in this iteration of research or if there has even been any improvement.

I'm curious about several things:

- does this process require expensive equipment ?

- I assume you can apply this process to other cells/substances - cocoa ? coca ? tobacco ? oranges ? potatoes ?

- if equipment became cheaper, could we envision people having a device for cellular agriculture at home?

- Yes, doing this at a meaningful scale will require large bioreactors with a price tag of tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. You will need LOTS of those reactors to get production beyond 1% of the world's current coffee consumption.

- With all of these, one has to ask what the point is if the bioreactor inputs are sugar (from plants) and other nutrients. If you want sustainability benefits for X where X = plant-based product, you're probably better off improving the current agricultural practices of growing X rather than growing X in a bioreactor.

- That's one of the loftier visions in biotech: decentralized manufacturing of basically anything. Anything along the lines of a convenient personal bioreactor currently seems like it might as well be a century away or more, but I'd certainly be an early adopter:)

I would guess that it depends on the final product. This works for coffee because it gets grinded to a fine powder. Cocoa might work as well, tobacco for e-smokig, etc.

It would be more sustainable if the poor countries that grow coffee would also be the ones that profit from it. As it is the big coffee factories are all in the rich West.

Almost as if slavery is still very much a thing.

Said poor countries are exactly where the do called west wants them to be. Do the Swiss grow coco? No, they buy it for peanuts, add some milk and sugar, then sell the final product for at least a modest profit.

I wish it was easy to support the people doing the actual work but how? Supporting native brands? Sure but how I know who controls the company and if they are any better than the exploiter I am trying to avoid?

Look into the Specialty Coffee Association and roastmagazine.com/dailycoffeenews/.

Also look at roast.com for an example. (I’m not affiliated.)

Funny it is Finland to come up with this. Since they are known for having god-awful coffee: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/9bqiil/macrons_reac...

That's clearly part of our competitive advantage here.

Because initial bioreactor coffee is probably worse than naturally grown varieties, you need a market that will accept that before you can get the kind of scale that will drive future improvement.

Or something.

You would think that, but the problem is that Finns like their coffee the way it is.

Has anyone tried to grow their own arabica coffee tree in a growtent at home?

> Sustainable coffee

Is this code word for "it's gonna be trash"?

Honestly curious, where in the world do you live? Equating sustainable with lower quality is really odd to me and I don’t think anywhere at least in Northern Europe.

If companies are producing just to get the lowest cost, it ends up being trash. Whenever anyone aims for sustainable products it’s obvious it will come at a higher price and quality becomes essential. That’s at least wha we see in all the sustainable products here

Sweden. We have replaced all our produce with lab grown GMOs with no taste what so ever.

Ridiculous. The aspect of being genetically modified or not has by itself no influence on parameters of taste. At the local supermarket, you will be hard pressed to find "lab grown GMOs" in any produce section - most of it is grown in southern Sweden using traditional high yield crops (that may taste like nothing for reasons of production).

The Swedish Food Agency[1] states that there are very few genetically modified products on the market at all.

1. https://www.livsmedelsverket.se/livsmedel-och-innehall/genmo...

It must be my imagination then.

Most of the produce in Sweden is imported. I do love my seasonal berries though, they taste great. Everything else, from tomatoes to letuce/cucumbers and other daily produce taste like nothing.

You can try to refute that but it's a fact. I've lived in the Mediterranean so i have something to compare against.

It's not normal to leave an apple on the counter and look the same after a month.

Not necessarily, rather it means at least double the price. Obviously, since veing sustainable and fair is always more expensive.

This is not that surprising. Most of the psychoactive Harmala alkaloids in coffee are formed during roasting; typically by pyrolytic breakdown and cyclization of tryptophan. So, naturally, if the psychoactive effects are the same, the taste will be perceived as the same.

"So, naturally, if the psychoactive effects are the same, the taste will be perceived as the same."

I have no idea about the rest of your statement, but of all the substances I know, taste and psychoactive effect are not at all the same. They maybe influence each other, yes, but the sensoric taste is a different input than the internal effects of the stimulant.

IIRC it has been shown that all taste preferences are acquired based on individual neurophysiological responses to taste stimuli; in other words, internal effects dictate external preferences.

Where was this shown?

No doubt there is influence, but on the first time use, flavor comes before the effect.

It was a study in a respectable journal, but unfortunately I cannot recall more.

Obviously one cannot have a preference for something they haven’t had.

But isn't then the "aquired taste" linked to that specific sensory input? So even though your brain likes substance x in the new coffee - it cannot connect it when drinking something that tastes different on first try, even though might have the same effect.

That’s the thing—taste is intimately linked with effect. Every coffee drinker will notice if someone switches brands on them.

That’s also why people with certain CYP3A4 variants dislike the taste of CYP3A4-inhibiting foods such as grapefruit, and people with certain variants absolutely love them.

CYP3A4 is a liver enzyme responsible for metabolising human sex hormones, as well as most pharmaceutical and recreational drugs, including caffeine.

Here’s a source clearly demonstrating that taste has not been selected for in our evolution, but effect on CYP3A4 has: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12862-019-1366-7

So that is the thing called 'acquired taste'?

Sorry, this is fascinating but I'm not finding the info I want to via search. What alkaloids do you mean? I'm guessing not just caffeine?

Harmala alkaloids, most abundantly harman and norharman.

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