Climate change is straining the world’s two favorite coffee species. Could a resilient 19th-century alternative solve the brew’s existential crisis?
it. You fancy yourself a coffee snob. You’ve got a favorite single-origin bean and are low-key judgmental of anyone who takes milk with their morning brew. You rate an espresso by the consistency of its crema, so it’s fortunate that you’re on first-name terms with a neighborhood barista who gets it dead right every single time. “Oh, you’re into coffee too?” you say to your colleague, eying the 10-gallon Starbucks tankard on their desk. “That’s nice.
But how far into the depths of coffee connoisseurship have you really dived? There are 124 coffee species out there and just two of them—arabica and robusta—account for around 99 percent of global coffee production. Even the most adventurous coffee fans rarely stray beyond these two headliners. But relying so heavily on just two coffee species is starting to look foolhardy.
Liberica wasn’t always on the periphery of the coffee industry. For a brief time in the late 19th century, it was the bean. At the time, the ubiquitous arabica coffee plants were stricken by leaf rust disease, which was annihilating trees in coffee plantations across Southeast Asia. Liberica seemed to be more resistant to leaf rust and grew well in warmer lowland regions, unlike fussy arabica, which prefers cool temperatures and higher altitudes.
Alas, liberica’s time at the top of the tree did not last long. Its big fruits were harder for coffee manufacturers to process and the knobbly beans inside were prone to being either over- or under-dried, resulting in a subpar cup of coffee. When coffee production in Brazil started to boom around the turn of the 20th century, most plantations opted to grow arabica, which quickly became the top dog in the international coffee trade. Since then, only two species have dominated.
One of the big problems with liberica has been that unless it is processed and roasted carefully, the taste itself can be off-putting. “I first tasted liberica back in 2012 and wrote it off as being completely disgusting,” says Davis. The taste reminded him of tinned soup. People who taste coffee for a living have a name for this: vegetal. In cupper parlance, calling a brew “vegetal” is basically a polite way of saying that the coffee sucks.
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