Lupin coffee by Helen. Our local coffee alternative
Coffee alternatives have existed for centuries. Today, lupin coffee in particular is becoming increasingly common in stores. Anyone looking for a caffeine-free, coffee-like beverage should find what they're looking for in lupins. In the future, coffee alternatives will become increasingly important because coffee is threatened by climate change. We visited the farm of sweet lupin producer Helen Wegmüller and launched our own lupin coffee with her.
Lupin coffee is a brewed beverage made from roasted, ground lupins steeped in hot water. In addition to the now widespread lupin coffee, there are other coffee substitute products made from chicory, grains and acorns.
But is the term "coffee" misleading? And might it create expectations that the beverage cannot meet? At least, lupin coffee won't achieve 80 points on a scoresheet. But perhaps it doesn't need to: perhaps it's simply enough to be a caffeine-free alternative.
Helen - our lupin coffee
We named our interpretation of a lupin coffee after the producer, Helen. We roast the coffee in a Rational commercial oven for six minutes at an air temperature of 250°.
Helen's lupins of the variety Jowisz produce a very sweet beverage with our light and short roast. We taste notes of licorice and fresh, dark bread. We produce the lupin coffee in small quantities in our kitchen and grind it on a mill dedicated solely to lupins.
A brief history of coffee-like beverages
Whenever something was difficult or expensive to obtain, alternatives were sought. First during the Napoleonic Continental Blockade between 1806 and 1812, but also in the post-war period, real coffee was a scarce commodity.
A pound of coffee cost as much as 50kg of potatoes.
But the desire for a coffee-like taste did not diminish: alternatives were sought and various substitute products made from grains and roots were roasted and ground to create a coffee-like beverage that could be steeped and drunk like coffee.
It is unclear when coffee made from sweet lupins began. The first mention dates back to 1897, when a lupin beverage was named "Altreier Kaffee" after the town in Tyrol. Today, lupin coffee is increasingly common, along with other lupin products such as lupin flour or lupin pasta.
It is clear that climate change will have an impact on coffee. What specific local effects are to be expected is unpredictable, but weather patterns will shift and planning will become less reliable. But it's not just the coffee plant itself that is vulnerable, but also the complex value chain behind it.
Helen Wegmüller explains why she grows lupins and how it works.
As a rule, coffee passes through many hands and travels thousands of kilometers before it can be roasted here. Coffee alternatives score points here with their robustness and the simpler, significantly shortened value chain.
A brief history of lupins
Lupins are allergens and must be declared on menus. Nevertheless, lupins are increasingly found on menus and in roastery product ranges.
But what are lupins?
The lupin belongs to the legume family, like soybeans, chickpeas, beans and peas. Thus it serves as a plant-based protein source and is versatile in its applications. The product list ranges from lupin flour to humus, from lupin bratwurst to seasoning sauce to yogurt.
The sweet lupin is not only culinarily versatile, it is also good for soil health:
it can fix up to 100kg of nitrogen, making it an ideal crop for crop rotation with cereals and maize.
Besides all the advantages, there is a risk. Lupins produce increased levels of alkaloids when stressed by drought, heat, moisture or pests. These cause increased bitterness and can be harmful to humans in too high concentrations. Therefore, in Germany, limit values must be below the threshold (not yet in Switzerland).
This risk is problematic for farmers; the market price for food products is much higher than for animal feed (which lupins are also suitable for). However, if the limit values are not met, farmers may end up with unsold product. Therefore, there has been a decline in the market (Luve as a well-known brand went insolvent) and many farmers are looking for alternatives.
As with coffee, there are different varieties of lupins. Some have higher yields, others less bitterness. In particular, the white lupin variety "Frieda" was heavily promoted by DSV-Saaten, according to lupin pioneer Linda from the organic farm Kelly, in our conversation.
Is lupin coffee a sustainable option as a coffee substitute?
Although we do not yet have exact data for Helen's cultivation, we can make a preliminary estimate of emissions using a dataset from Carbon Cloud. There, Swiss lupins are listed with a carbon footprint of 0.79 kg CO2e per kg of lupins. We add the roasting loss of approximately 15% and the emissions generated by our roastery and transport.
Helen delivered the lupins we received from her on her next errands. The distance from farm to roastery is 73 km, and we allocate 50% of the resulting emissions to the lupins.
According to this simplified calculation, the result is 1.46 kg CO2e/kg lupin coffee. Thus the emissions are significantly lower than those of our Santa Rita coffees at 2.96 kg CO2e/kg. It becomes even clearer when we also include the average value of a roasted, conventionally produced coffee from Brazil.
Preparation of lupin coffee
As we approached creating the recipes, we first had to forget everything we had learned about coffee so far. Tamping, for example, the compression of ground coffee in the portafilter, becomes unnecessary. We noticed in various extractions that tamping, if at all, had only marginal influence on flow times.
The reason is that lupin coffee swells very much and expands in the portafilter. This way, the "lupin cake" creates high resistance through which the water finds its way.
This brings us to extraction times that - for a classic espresso extraction - are beyond the norm. But the first extractions at 60 seconds were not only drinkable, but very balanced. We noticed: the longer the brew, the sweeter the beverage. We would have expected it to become increasingly bitter, but: that would be the coffee mindset.
In the lupin coffee mindset, we see that longer extractions with lightly roasted sweet lupins can emphasize sweetness.
We tried various recipes. Here are our three favorites:
Filter coffee with lupins / French Press
- we recommend the French press, or plunger pot
- we recommend 10g sweet lupin coffee per 100ml water
- the water should be used shortly after boiling, so that we achieve a high extraction
- we pour about 50ml water over the lupins, stir so that all the coffee is well saturated, and fill up to the desired amount of water
- after three minutes we stir again vigorously and press the plunger down at 3:30 minutes
Espresso with lupins
- we like the beverage ratio 1:2.6 best - time is negligible
- we fill 15g lupin coffee into a double portafilter
- we extract 40g beverage into the cup as a double espresso, or 20g per cup if you take two cups
- depending on the pump pressure of your machine, you can do this in shorter or longer times, approximately 30 seconds could be a reference
- longer extraction times have no negative impact on taste when combined with the light roast
Long coffee with lupins
- we like the beverage ratio 1:7 or 1:8 best
- we use 12g lupin coffee in a double portafilter
- we extract 90g total amount into a cup
