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Extreme weather events—think drought, floods, and extreme heat—have occurred more frequently over the last few years. That’s bad news for coffee: studies have shown that climate change could decrease both the quantity and quality of coffee production. However, it can be hard to grasp what that might entail. What if there were a way to try coffee from the future to see how it might taste?
An industrial designer named Sarah Ali created a project called Brew_Lab in collaboration with climate researchers and NASA experts. As Jamie Richards reports for TechRadar, the project attempts to replicate the taste of cups of coffee from three possible futures: Brazil in 2027, Sierra Leone in 2080, and Mars in 2126.
Ali created Brew_Lab—part engineering project, part art installation—for her postgraduate degree in Material Futures from the University of the Arts London. She used climate projections and research to create what she calls “edible scents” for each scenario, which she added to regular cups of coffee to enhance their flavor.
To create the scents, she partnered with the Australian company Scentible, which develops sensory development kits for the coffee industry. In a video produced by the company, Ali explains that “80% of taste is smell, so I decided to build a machine that outputs smells to alter coffee flavors to a future one.” Ali designed what she calls a self-operated “coffee vending machine” that users can adjust to deliver smells from their chosen future.
Two of the scents Ali designed were from possible terrestrial futures. The first was based on a Brazilian coffee circa 2027, which Richards writes “is used to emphasize the frailty of the Arabica bean.” Research suggests that 50% or more of arabica-growing land could become unsuitable for cultivation by 2050, and 60% of wild arabica species are at risk of extinction. The near-future coffee scent reduces sugar and acidity and increases bitterness to highlight the effects of higher temperatures on arabica.
The second scent aims to predict how coffee grown in Sierra Leone in 2080 might taste. For this, she used data from Dr Aaron Davis’ work on stenophylla, a wild coffee species that botanists at the U.K.’s Royal Botanical Society have been researching for its climate resilience. Although the taste profile of the 2080 scent isn’t noted, stenophylla has previously been described as tasting similar to arabica, with Davis reporting notes of chocolate, caramel, and jasmine.
To create the taste profile of the potentially Mars-grown drink, Ali drew upon NASA research that studied the possibility of agriculture on the red planet. She used the hardy coffee species, Coffea racemosa, due to its extreme drought and heat tolerance. Ali also considered the impact Mars’ lower gravity would have on the coffee’s taste—lack of gravity can dull sensory perception. The Mars scent was “designed to taste engineered,” Ali says in the video, and she artificially increased its intensity to counteract the dulling effect of low gravity.
“I thought of Mars because it’s a very extreme scenario”, Ali told TechRadar, “and the extreme scenarios allow us to really understand what’s happening. How do we think about things differently, to avoid that future or prepare for it.”
The project’s description on the Material Futures website says the flavor profiles are designed to change “in real time” in response to new climate data from Ali’s research partners. “Its constant variation reflects the industry’s volatility, offering a sensory glimpse into the impact of our daily consumption.”
Read more on Martian 2126 coffee from TechRadar here.
Photo by Daniele Colucci on Unsplash
