News and knowledge

Four new countries have committed to participate in the International Multilocation Variety Trial (IMLVT), the largest, collaborative, global coffee research platform and variety exchange in history. Australia, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, and the United States (Hawaii) will all join the trial in 2017, bringing the total number of participating countries to 23.

This week, two major academic papers in coffee sensory science were published in open-access, peer-reviewed journals. The first describes the creation of the World Coffee Research Sensory Lexicon by a team of sensory scientists at Kansas State University and Texas A&M. The second describes how the work from the lexicon was adapted by researchers at UC Davis and the Specialty Coffee Association of America to create a new version of the Coffee Taster's Flavor Wheel, the first time the iconic wheel has been based on the work of expert scientists.

At the biannual International Conference on Coffee Science, held this year in China's Yunnan province, the world's top coffee researchers gathered to share their recent findings. World Coffee Research was there presenting three papers, on coffee's genetic diversity, climate change, and the relationship between coffee leaf rust and quality.

In a plenary session at the World Coffee Leader's Forum in Korea, Tim Schilling tackles one of the biggest questions facing the coffee industry.

At the Starbucks inside Texas A&M University’s Evans Library, students line up for their daily jolt of java. Across campus, in a rather ordinary laboratory inside the horticulture building, Fabian Echeverria is trying to prevent a worldwide coffee shortage.