This story was originally published in our Nov/Dec 2022 issue as "Delivering a Jolt to Coffee’s Future." Click here to subscribe to read more stories like this one.
On a small hill near a busy highway in Sierra Leone, Jeremy Haggar found what might be the future of coffee. Haggar, a coffee researcher at the University of Greenwich in the U.K., was looking at a single small green tree, about waist high, hidden amidst the undergrowth in the West African country.
If the stories were true, the humble plant represented an almost unbelievably fortuitous collection of attributes. Known by scientists as coffea stenophylla, the plant was once cultivated for commercial production, but had disappeared for the better part of the last century. It was said to tolerate temperatures higher than other commercial species, resist droughts and fungal infections, and, amazingly, taste better than almost any coffee on the market today.
Haggar was in Sierra Leone following up on years of scientific detective work aimed at rediscovering stenophylla. He and others had chased leads across the country in search of the fabled coffee species, turning up dead ends and false hopes.
