Sarada Krishnan, director of horticulture at the Denver Botanic Gardens, holds coffee tree leaves she collected recently from a trip to South Sudan to study the DNA of the plants. (Cyrus McCrimmon, The Denver Post)

Coffee didn't alter the direction of Sarada Krishnan's life. It merely flowed through it.

She was a year into her Ph.D. at the University of Colorado at Boulder, focusing on Prunus africana, an endangered tree in Madagascar. After a year of toil reviewing all the previous research, she found out the grant she'd been hoping would fund her project had been given to another scholar.

"I was devastated," she said. "After a year of working on it, I had to completely start over."

She opened a book, and a photograph fell out. It showed her late father, standing in the trees of her family's coffee plantation in the Wynad district of Kerala, an Indian state.

"I thought, 'Oh! Maybe I should work on coffee.' And it turned out there was a need for coffee research in Madagascar."

The liquid fuel that kick-starts so many mornings across the globe is anything but simple in horticulture, in commerce, in ethics. Coffee is the world's second-most widely traded commodity (oil is No. 1). It provides a living for 75 million people. The coffee fruit, whose "beans" are actually seeds, grows on trees in the subtropical mountains of Jamaica, Haiti, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Kenya 80 countries in all.

Preserving the genes of those coffee trees is what drives Krishnan, the Denver Botanic Gardens' horticulture director. And it drives her at 80 or 90 miles an hour. She talks fast, the words, big technical ones, tumbling out. Since powering through that bump on the way to her doctorate, she has bought two coffee plantations in Jamaica and is part-owner of a third; she'd like to use one of them for coffee research. She's consulted on efforts to revitalize the coffee industry in Haiti. She's waiting for her importer's license and certification to come through. She's divorced with two sons, Vinay, 19, and Vilok, 16.

Her favorite brew? Jamaican Blue Mountain,. Her drink at Starbucks? A triple-shot latte. "I do sugar and milk, which is sacrilege to real coffee experts. Sugar is bad enough, but milk! But that's how I grew up drinking it. And I started at 7 or 8 years old."

She drinks coffee. She farms coffee. She studies coffee. "For me, having the production side is beneficial to the scientific side and vice versa," she says.

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Denver researcher works to study, preserve coffee beans' gene pool

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