Contrabeans.

A team of Brazilian scientists says it has discovered an Ethiopian coffee bean with only 6% of the caffeine of normal beans, heralding the end of sleepless nights for coffee drinkers. Not to mention coffee companies, which spend millions of dollars to leach caffeine from green coffee beans to make decaf--10% of the multibillion dollar world coffee market. * Demand is high: The Japanese are at work on genetically modified buzz-free bean. But the news of a naturally caffeine-free bean has instead brought headaches. Coffee drinkers may have found the holy grain, but the man behind the discovery, Paulo Mazzafera of Brazil's University of Campinas, was shocked to read newspaper reports that the Ethiopians accused him of stealing the beans. They demanded a cut of any profits. * "It caused us problems because bio-piracy is robbery," says Mazzafera. "It is not true." Brazil obtained the seeds 40 years ago when a team of Brazilian scientists joined representatives from six other countries, including Ethiopia, on a United States-led initiative to collect Ethiopian coffee specimens in danger of extinction. * The group divided up the seeds they collected and took them home to cultivate them, to Costa Rica, India, Peru, Portugal, Tanzania and Brazil. In 1996 Brazilian scientists began testing their 3,000 specimens in a bid to find the elusive decaf strain. In October last year they hit the jackpot. "I've never been to Ethiopia and I didn't take plants from there," Mazzafera says. "It is important to point out that we did not steal anything."