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Home  Articles The New Health Beverage Made Even Healthier: Health-Enhanced Coffees
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The New Health Beverage Made Even Healthier: Health-Enhanced Coffees |
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Tuesday, 26 July 2005 |
by Kenneth Davids
Excerpt Courtesy of the May Edition of Coffee Review
The unusual coffees in this month's cupping are the offspring of
two trends. The first is the discovery that coffee has as
much right to claim membership in the surprise-it's-good-for-you
club as do long-time club members green tea and red wine. The
second, converging trend is the popularity of hybrid beverages
that combine familiar ingredients with substances ranging from
vitamins to medicinal herbs in an attempt to convince buyers that
these often odd-tasting beverages in strange-shaped containers
will help them take on the world with more energy, less weight
gain, better attitude, etc.
Health Suspect to Hero
The still unfolding transformation of coffee from dietary
villain to fitness drink, loaded with antioxidants and documented
health benefits, must come as a surprise to coffee drinkers of my
generation, still used to defending our favorite beverage against
the attacks of herbal tea drinkers leering smugly at us from over
their mugs of thin-bodied stuff smelling like a cross between
deodorant and dead leaves.
Coffee's transformation from health suspect to a position
somewhere between health-neutral to strongly health-positive is
too complex to summarize here, but it started with the discovery
that in long-term studies that connect dietary and other habits to
incidence of disease and mortality, regular coffee drinkers often
fared better, not worse, than non-coffee drinkers in certain
categories, ranging from suicide (fewer coffee drinking nurses
committed suicide than those who didn't drink it) to decreased
risk of colon cancer.
Step Aside Green Tea
About the same time laboratory researchers identified the
presence of substantial amounts of antioxidants in coffee. One
well-conducted study, for example, concluded that the average cup
of coffee generates four times as much antioxidant activity as
generated by the same cup of green tea. At this point, some
researchers began to look for possible links of coffee to disease
prevention rather than disease cause. The results of this new research
are still coming in, but at this point the scorecard looks rather
good for coffee, with coffee consumption associated with reduced
risk of certain cancers, Parkinson's disease, hepatic diseases,
and kidney stones. For a summary of potential benefits from a
pro-coffee perspective, go to www.coffeescience.org. For a more
detached survey of coffee health issues, log on to the European
site www.cosic.org. As for health risks of coffee drinking,
nothing at all has been proven against coffee when consumed at a
level of four or fewer cups per day. (When considering this
guideline, however, remember that we are talking 5-ounce cups,
not 20-ounce grandes. For espresso drinkers, this guideline would
translate to about four to five shots of espresso per day.)
Enter Entrepreneurship
So how is the specialty coffee industry, always looking for a
new opportunity for product differentiation, responding to the
good news about coffee and health? This month's review counts the
ways.
First, claim that your roasting process retains more of the
goodness in coffee while muting acidity, the sensory property
that most often drives newcomers away from coffee. This is the
strategy pursued by this month's Puroast samples. According to
Puroast, its very long roast process with almost no convection
through the roast chamber results in 33 to 40 percent less
acidity while presumably preserving all the other good stuff in coffee
that, according to the Puroast bag copy, makes coffee - a
"natural cure" to life's daily struggles."
Cafe Sunrise makes no claims about acidity, but advertises
that coffee roasted by its "Healthy Roast" process retains
100 percent of the antioxidants naturally occurring in the bean."
This claim is based on a process that soaks the green beans
before roasting in a liquid that absorbs and preserves
antioxidant polyphenols that may be lost during the roast. This
antioxidant-charged liquid is then used to cool or quench the
same beans after roasting, presumably restoring the antioxidants
held in the liquid to the roasted coffee.
A second health-oriented marketing strategy is to offer a
coffee that is a regular coffee promising all of the newly
uncovered potential health benefits, but a regular coffee with
the troubling acidity reduced through treatment of the green bean
before roasting. This treatment is performed in Germany, and
consists of removing the waxy outer layer from the green beans by
steaming. Reduced-acidity coffees from the Johann Wulff
collection and Hevla Coffee are reviewed here. (A health
conundrum: If chlorogenic acids are among the acids removed by
the German acid-reducing process, then the antioxidant properties
of the coffee may be impaired, given that chlorogenic acids are
among the more prominent antioxidants cited as present in coffee.
Just a thought.)
Intensification by Addition
The most radical approach to boosting coffee as a health
beverage is to follow the lead of many other new beverages and
attempt to make coffee even healthier by adding other healthy
ingredients to it.
What other ingredients? In the case of the new Caffe Botanica
line, calcium is added to create a "Strength" coffee,
ginseng to create an "Energy" coffee, and the herb
Echinacea to make a "Health" coffee. The "Go Joe!" coffee
from Jeremiah's Pick in San Francisco also follows the ginseng
strategy, although it complicates the recipe by making the
ginseng component a whole cocktail of ginsengs from five
different origins. Finally, Gano Cafe, a soluble or instant
beverage, combines coffee with the extract of an Asian medicinal
mushroom called Ganoderma Lucidum, which purports to enhance the
coffee with a variety of health benefits.
Given the sensory risks, I was surprised that only two of these
substance-enhanced coffees were outright unpleasant: The
calcium-infused "Strength" coffee from Caffe Botanica displayed a
mouthfeel like chalk and a finish like Bufferin, and the
mushroom-enhanced instant Gano Cafe was sour, bitter and utterly
lifeless.
However, the other coffee-plus entries offered plausible,
interesting cups. The echinacea added to the Botanica "Health"
coffee didn't seem to influence the flavor of this decent,
well-roasted coffee one way or the other. More surprisingly,
ginseng resonated fairly well both with the dark-roasted
decaffeinated beans of the Caffe Botanica "Energy" coffee and the
Jeremiah's Pick "Go Joe!" I can see some sensory advantages to
combining ginseng with coffee, given the difficulties I had
choking down straight ginseng teas and suspensions during my
alternative lifestyle years.
The Low Acidity Strategy
We visited the acidity issue in coffee in some detail in our
December 2000 Low-Acid Coffees article and reviews. During this
month's little follow-up survey of acid-reduced coffees I ran
into a couple of pleasant surprises. With the dark roasts from
Hevla Coffee and Johann Wulff, reducing the acidity of the green
beans by treating them also appeared to reduce the bitterness and
astringency that so often constitute the downside of dark-roasted
formats. As for the acidity reduction through roasting strategy,
slow roasting did reduce the acidy sensation in the Puroast
samples, but didn't seem to treat the rest of the sensory profile
very well. The Cafe Sunrise samples were pleasant, interesting
coffees, but my experience suggests they could be even better
without the impact of the "Healthy Roast" procedure, which I
assume is the cause of the cardboardy or woody undercurrents
shadowing these cups.
Let It Be?
Among these entrepreneuring efforts at coffee healthmanship
there were some pleasant sensory successes as well as a couple of
resounding sensory duds. Nevertheless, it's hard not to conclude
that if coffee is indeed as health-enhancing as it now appears to
be, then we might be better off simply picking a good one,
roasting it sensitively and enjoying it in its naked glory,
without doing peculiar things to it like steaming it or roasting
it in a sealed drum or adding things to it. |
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