Yeast reason behind varied chocolate taste

New York: Do you love Swiss chocolates more than those from Indonesia? You may thank diverse yeast population for that particular taste as researchers have found that those differences may play an important role in the characteristics of chocolate and coffee from different parts of the world.

In comparison to the yeasts found in vineyards around the world, those associated with coffee and cacao beans show much greater diversity, the findings showed."Our study suggests a complex interplay between human activity and microbes involved in the production of coffee and chocolate," said Aimee Dudley of the Pacific Northwest Diabetes Research Institute in Seattle, US.

"Humans have transported and cultivated the plants, but at least for one important species, their associated microbes have arisen from transport and mingling in events that are independent of the transport of the plants themselves," Dudley noted. Coffee and cacao trees originally grew in Ethiopia and the Amazon rain forest.

They are now widely cultivated across the "bean belt" that surrounds the equator. After they are picked, both cacao and coffee beans are fermented for a period of days to break down the surrounding pulp.