The Science of Coffee: Plant Genetics

The Crop Trust is an international non-profit organization dedicated to conserving and making crop diversity available for use globally, forever and for the benefit of everyone.

Geisha coffee berries from Hacienda La Esmeralda in Panama. Hacienda la Esmeralda is renowned as the largest producer of Geisha coffee, a variety originally from Ethiopia, which arrived in Panama via the CATIE genebank in the 1960s. (Photo: Luis Salazar/Crop Trust)

By The Science of Coffee Podcast

8 November 2022

Crop Trust Director of Programs, Sarada Krishnan, joined The Science of Coffee podcast episode on "Plant Genetics".

The Science of Coffee is a journey into coffee's hidden microscopic secrets to help you make even better coffee at home. Across six episodes, documentary maker and coffee professional James Harper takes you deep into the world of water for coffee, coffee extraction, plant genetics, espresso technology, latte foam and sonic seasoning.

This episode explores how genetic development can produce a coffee tree that might save the day. Is there a wild coffee tree happily growing in the forests somewhere that could be our silver bullet? What about if we mix existing documented species together?