Are There Naturally Low-Caffeine Coffee Varieties—and How Are They Different From Decaf?

What a low-caffeine variety on a bag usually means

Coffee plants make caffeine, but not every variety makes the same amount.

The International Trade Centre puts typical green-bean caffeine at about 0.8%–1.7% in arabica and 1.5%–2.5% in robusta. Most arabica on bags still sits in that band. Specialty coffee does not mean less caffeine. Caffeine and cup quality are not the same measurement.

Sometimes a low-caffeine variety still shows up on a bag. That is an arabica cultivar that is genetically lower in caffeine, especially Laurina. It is not later turned into decaf; the plant is simply born with less.

Laurina is the name you often see on a bag

Laurina is also called Bourbon Pointu. Lécolier and colleagues wrote in Euphytica in 2009 that it is a Coffea arabica mutant, generally described as selected on Bourbon Island—now Réunion—in the early nineteenth century. The same paper says the origin stories do not agree, so the discovery year is unsettled.

Compared with ordinary Bourbon, the tree is dwarf, with a Christmas-tree shape. A second 2009 paper in Trees treats that as the recessive, single-locus laurina mutation: shorter internodes, a smaller tree, and a changed silhouette. The seeds are often more pointed, which is what pointu names.

On caffeine, Silvarolla and colleagues in 2000 relay Carvalho: about 0.6% in Laurina green beans versus about 1.2% in other arabica cultivars. Perfect Daily Grind also calls it roughly half.

The same article relays growers’ experience that caffeine helps deter pests, so a lower-caffeine plant can be more vulnerable. Care costs often keep yields low. It is not a bulk supermarket variety.

Species, experimental cultivars, and decaf need to be read separately

Two other names get mixed in.

One is experimental cultivars. Silvarolla, Mazzafera, and Fazuoli recorded in Nature in 2004 that three Ethiopian arabica plants at the Instituto Agronômico de Campinas—AC1, AC2, and AC3—were almost caffeine-free. Seeds averaged about 0.76 milligrams of caffeine per gram of dry weight; the Brazilian cultivar Mundo Novo was about 12 milligrams per gram. This is still germplasm research, not a common name on a retail bag.

The other is a different species. Stoffelen and colleagues described Coffea charrieriana from Cameroon in 2008 as caffeine-free in the seed. It was the first such record for Central Africa and the second for the African continent. It does not belong to arabica. Whether a wild species becomes a stable farm crop is a matter of extension and field trials, and that is another page.

Decaf is a third thing. The work is done to green coffee, taking caffeine out of it. How the process runs belongs on a later decaf page. For now: a variety that is born lower in caffeine, and coffee that is later made into decaf, are different layers of the discussion.

So a bag that says low-caffeine, Laurina, or Bourbon Pointu can be read as a matter of plant ancestry. How much caffeine you drink still depends on dose, brew, and serving size. If you want to read more, see the caffeine article.