Brain-bending thoughts on a coffee experiment


The Stat-Ease training center here at our world headquarters in Minneapolis features a wonderful single-cup brewing system that you can see demoed here.  When we are not holding a workshop, I sometimes sneak in to steal a cup late in the day.  By then I am reaching my limit, so I brew a “half-calf” at the half-cup setting.  Being a chemical engineer, I calculate that, in this case, half of half makes a whole, that is, coffee with the normal concentration of caffeine.  Does that make sense?

Making a tasty and effective cup of coffee is a huge deal for knowledge workers who need to keep their heads in gear from start to finish of every single day.  One of our workshop students, a PhD, has been picking my brain about testing coffee blends on her staff of scientists.  She proposes to do a mixture design such as I did on varying types of beers (see Mixture Design Brews Up New Beer Cocktail—Black & Blue Moon).

Obviously overall liking on a sensory basis should be first and foremost for such an experiment on coffee – a 5 to 9-point scale works well for this.*  However, the tricky part is assessing the impact of coffee for accelerating information processing and general problem-solving, which I hypothesize depends on level of caffeine.  I wonder if an online “brain training” service, such as this one developed by neuroscientists at Stanford and UCSF, might provide a valid measure.

The down side of doing a proper test on whether coffee improves cognitive skills will be the necessity of reverting to the base line, that is, every morning getting up and trying to function without the first cup.

“A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.”

— Alfréd Rényi

*Turn your volume down (to not hear the advert) and see this primer on sensory evaluation by S-Cool– a UK educational site for teenagers.

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