How to design a hyper-coffee plant
How much caffeine could you fit into a roasted coffee bean (that will later be ground and steeped) while still having a strong coffee flavor?
I'm aiming for a super-caffeine boost -- something where you only need a thermos to last you a week, something that keeps you awake for three or four days if you take more than a couple cups per day.
It should be a dose high enough to be bad for your health if taken regularly, but not high enough that it does serious or permanent damage to your liver, brain, or heart. It should preferably work if steeped with water (cream nixes the effect).
It's from a magical plant, the magic part being that it:
- Stays in your brain, blocking tiredness for long periods of time,
- Is strengthened by sugar but deactivated by cream
- Holds its flavor/caffeine through roasting and grinding I did some research -- the average coffee bush can produce $5\space to\space 7$ pounds of coffee per year. Assuming that this is coffee cherry, $20\%$ of that weight would become roasted beans. $20\%$ of an average of $6$ pounds is $\frac{20}{100}$ $(\frac{1} {5}) \times 6$. That gives $1\frac{1}{5} (1.2)$ pounds of finished roasted beans per bush.
Since a pound is a pound, that means $1.2$ pounds of ground coffee per bush. (Please excuse me, I'm doing some mental calculations here.) A $1.2$ pound bag of ground coffee yields a good number of cups of liquid, (mm. Some sources say up to $100$, though I'm skeptical.) which would mean that this bean could dominate the coffee market if it was targeted towards drinkers who mainly drink it for the energy boost.
I imagine it could be taken in little espresso-like shots, or perhaps watered down in regular mugs. But coffee's flavor is made up of many different profiles, and I want to keep the coffee flavor in addition to the massive caffeine boost.
Are there any good solutions as to how all of this flavor and caffeine could be packed as densely as possible into a small number of beans? What structure would the plant and the beans/coffee cherry need to be? How would the plant produce that much caffeine?
The coffee should be strong enough that more than 1 and 1/2 cups of undiluted brew is lethal. In other words, this is not something you want to guzzle by the thermos.
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Alternative answer; Studies show that sleep is your bodies way of purging out toxins and recharging, though a lot of it is still unknown.
Instead of caffeine, what if the plant created an enzyme that has an effect similar to the self clean mode that the body uses; flush toxins, recharge energy, reboot the system.
Another possibility is that it could be a mind altering chemical that either causes the human brain to mimic a dolphin brain, where half of it shuts down at a time, or a giraffe brain, which only needs 30 total minutes of sleep a day, usually in 5 minute chunks.
If like a dolphin different parts of the human brain shut down at different concentrations of the chemical, it could be used to minimize the need for sleep.
If the sleep cycle could be accelerated then a human might be able to get by on micro naps instead of needing long solid chunks of sleep.
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