Light Roast vs Dark Roast

Another big week in coffee news, featuring:

• The arabica futures market hit its highest-ever point (assuming you don’t take inflation into account), surging to $3.48 per pound last week. This latest spike happened in part because the green trader Volcafe cut its expectations for Brazil’s harvest by about 11 million bags.
• Coffee wilt disease is a relatively unstudied and underestimated coffee ailment, but over the past century it has periodically decimated production in parts of Africa. Researchers have now uncovered more about how the fungal pathogen evolved and spreads in order to hopefully manage any future outbreak.
• Does light- or dark-roasted coffee contain more caffeine? Fed up with the lack of hard data on the subject, a team of scientists decided to investigate using carefully controlled parameters. The result? Inconclusive.

For more on all these stories, plus some coffee unionizing news, check out the full Roundup over at Fresh Cup Magazine:

I’ll be back on Friday with a new article—this time it actually will be on the coffee price spike and its links to the climate crisis—but this is the final news roundup of the year. There will be an epic Fresh Cup News Year In Review out sometime over the next week or two, and normal roundup service will resume on January 6, 2025.

Until Friday, it’s goodbye from Merlin: