'... can be used to make a substitue for coffee' - if (like me) you're a reader of books about foraging, wild food and bushcraft, you'll have seen this phrase applied to an assortment of different things.
So it's possible to make fake coffee - OK, but how good is it? - let's find out.
Experiment Two - Cleavers
Cleavers, or Goosegrass - Galium aparine - is a wiry, sprawling, twining herbaceaous annual plant common to hedgerows, path edges in woodland and waste ground.
Some other common names for this plant are Stickyweed, Sticky Willie and Catchweed - these (as well as 'Cleavers') refer to the fact that all parts of the plant are covered with tiny bristly hooks making it cling to almost anything - especially soft fabrics.
The plant is in the same botanical family as true coffee (Rubiaceae) so the folk recipes for using the roasted and ground seeds as a coffee substitute sound quite promising.
The plant has leaves arranged in ray-like radial whorls. The stems are ridged and contain tough fibres.
The greenish white four- petalled flowers are so tiny, they're easy to overlook entirely. They're followed by pairs of roundish fruits, easch containing a single seed about 2 to 3 millimetres across.
The fruits are covered in the same bristly hooks as the rest of the plant - the seeds may be dispersed by becoming attached to the fur of animals (or the clothes of humans).
By the end of summer, the plant dies back to a mass of dull, straw-like stems and the fruits are easily found.
Collecting them, however, is pretty laborious. The best way I could find was to pick a place where the plant has grown in great profusion, then pull out whole clumps of it, then take somewhere nearby to sit down and pick off the seeds.
Even so, it still took me half an hour to collect enough fruits for this experiment - about a handful.
So I can't see this substitute presenting a commercial threat to real coffee anytime soon, no matter what it tastes like.
Preparing the seeds was also hard, time-consuming work - rinsing them in cold water and rubbing them vigorously between my hands, the bristly casings eventually came off, revealing the little, dark brown dimpled seeds.
Several repeats of the process of rinsing and rubbing were necessary to rid the seeds of nearly all traces of debris.
I then roasted the seeds in a hot (200C) oven for twenty minutes and - lacking a proper coffee grinder - crushed them between two spoons.
At this stage, they do smell a bit like ground coffee, but only a bit.
A handful of seeds in their casings reduced to about a tablespoon of ground seeds - just enough for one cup of fake coffee.
So I put the grounds in my cafetière, added boiling water and left them to stand for ten minutes (as prescribed by some of my wild food reference books.
The result is a very pale-looking beverage, but what is it like to drink?
Tasting
To begin with, it doesn't really look like coffee - and appearance really does matter, because with something as familiar as coffee, perception is everything - and if any detail is a bit off, it's going to affect the whole experience.
The flavour is delicate - certainly coffee-like, but rather indistinct. Slight licorice tones.
The aroma is faint, but reasonably convincingly coffee-like
Verdict
For the amount of effort required to prepare it, the end result was pretty disappointing. It's a fair substitute for weak coffee, but no better than weak instant coffee in its closeness to the real thing.
1/5 - Flavour is weak and indistinct.
2/5 - Neither good nor bad - not much aroma.
2/5 - Disappointingly weak, not a particularly satisfying drink.
2/5 - Similar to coffee flavour, but a very weak performance.
Pity it wasn't useful for coffee but apparently (see here http://www.altnature.com/gallery/cleavers.htm ) it can be used medicinally.
One use I was aware for it is that the roots can be used to make a red dye.