Why, when making a caffeinated drink, we use leaves from some plants (with tea or maté) but for coffee we take the berry? Why not coffee leaves or tea berries? Is it the respectively best way to get the most caffeine/flavor or is it just historical?
In: Biology
I need a biologist! Other plants, like hot peppers, have gotten hot to dissuade some animals from ingesting them and to encourage others. The “heat” is packed into the fruit as it’s the most appealing part.
Is caffeine along the same lines? It either protects the leaves or fruit from getting ingested or to encourage it?
My reasoning is that this is why it is “located” heavily in some parts of the plant.
Well, it’s part the best, part the only way. It’s the characteristic of the plant. Coffee beans simply contain the highest amount of ccaffeine, but also burning the beans give them specific aromas.
The same with tea. Yu could potentially put roots in hot water, but it would not have the same taste…
Tea camellias don’t have berries to speak of. Their seeds are in a husk with no real flesh or body. I don’t think there’s any caffeine in the seeds themselves either, but I’m not sure about that.
Same reason we eat the potato and the apple. Even though one is a root and one is a fruit. It is the ‘good’ part of the plant.
Edit: thanks for all the up votes and awards.
Also, many people saying a potato is not a root. In reply I would say that to a 5 year old they are.
Edit 2: Maybe people missed the ‘GOOD PART OF THE PLANT’ part? Plants have many parts, some are good for humans, some are not.
Some cactus is amazing, but don’t eat the spines.
you CAN drink the tea made by extracting the dried cherry flesh. it’s called Cascara. it’s .. erm. it is. it’s like drinking the most tannic tea you’ve ever tried, tastes somewhat like cherry, and has a mild caffeine buzz to it.
the Seed however is what was initially drunk, because if you leave coffee cherries out in the sun for a few days, you’ll end up with a pile of dried coffee beans (or, more correctly, a pile of green coffee beans.). the thing is though, they dont really keep all that well, unless you wash the cherry flesh off first.
it’s not too difficult to see that someone, in an attempt to speed up the drying process accidentally dry roasted a pile of beans..
“Tea” is technically leaves from the tea plant infused into hot water. “Herbal tea” is basically the same thing made from any plant other than tea plants.
You *can* indeed prepare leaves from coffee plants in the exact same way and steep them, which gives you “coffee tea”. It tastes much more like tea than anything like coffee. The oils and flavorful compounds that make coffee taste like coffee just aren’t in the leaves.
In French dandelion is called pis-en-lit, i.e. wet-the-bed, precisely because of that effect.
Different parts of plants have more pleasing aromas and tastes. Coffee leaves do have caffeine in them but they taste VERY bitter even when roasted so we just don’t use them; they don’t appeal to most of us. Every plant has some parts we like and some we don’t, some plants have several parts we like and use (stems, stamens, flowers, fruits, leaves, berries, roots etc.), some, like dandelions, we use all the parts, others we do not.
Same with citrus flowers, they contain caffine but the fruit does not. That’s geared towards pollinators and keep them coming back for more.
In my country we also make tea from the flower of the coffee plant and from the pulp of the fruit.
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