Posts Tagged coffee
Making the most from every coffee bean and doing so tastefully
Posted by mark in food science on June 19, 2025
Yesterday Andrew MacPherson from our UK affiliate PrismTC presented a great talk on deploying design of experiments (DOE) via Stat-Ease® 360 software for Developing Optimal Espressos. He worked out a clever way to tailor the grinding and brewing conditions to his taste for specific coffee beans based on where they are grown. Brilliant!
Our team at Stat-Ease did something similar, focusing on light, medium and dark roasts with blends of all three bean types; then grinding them to a range particle sizes in varying amounts. Read all about this mixture-process DOE in the September 2016 Stat-Teaser article on Brewing the Perfect Pot of Office Coffee.
Of course, taste is of paramount importance for coffee. However, with the cost of beans skyrocketing over the past 6 months (and likely to increase more as tariffs imposed by the US government on April 5th take effect), it is also good to use less coffee when brewing. First off, going from espresso to a regular coffee machine will be a step forward by allowing a reduction in the ratio of coffee to water. Even better, if you are willing to forego automation, make your coffee via the pour over method—invented in 1908 by Melitta Bentz.
Recently a team of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania created an optimal pour-over process using a goose-neck kettle that achieved an avalanche in the ground coffee, which resulted in the maximum flavor extracted from the minimum amount of beans.* See photos, graphs and figures illustrating their findings at this ResearchGate post. For a translation from physics and fluid dynamics terms, see this April 8th USA Today article by Elizabeth Weise: Scientists release instructions for how to make a perfect cup of coffee.
It would be great to try reproducing these earth shaking (more accurately—coffee shaking) results via a DOE on flow rate, pour height, and amount of coffee. Mainly I would like an excuse to buy a goose-neck kettle like this Coffee Gator.
It hits a lot of hot buttons for feature freaks like me—a surgical-grade stainless steel body, “cool-touch ergonomic handle, brewing ‘golden-zone’ thermometer [I like that a lot!], precision pour spout and triple-layer induction-friendly base” (the hyperbolic bits quoted from their sales site on Amazon).
Hmmm…induction-friendly…so to take advantage of the base I need to upgrade our stove. More gadgetry—hooray! No worries convincing my wife, the expense will be made up by the savings in coffee (ha ha).
To bean or not to bean, that is the question for coffee
Posted by mark in food science on February 13, 2024
In my most recent blog post on coffee I reported that a finer grind may not always be better. Now another piece of the puzzle for producing java that jives falls into place: Spritz your beans with water.
Evidently this is not a new discovery—those who really know their coffee-making craft routinely moisturize their grind to reduce clumping. A new study reported here by New Scientist reveals the problem: static electricity. Following up on the link to the original publication, I see that the research team, led by a volcanologist (sensible considering the lightning generated by particle-laden eruptions), deployed this $3000 German-made, handcrafted machine to produce extremely uniform grinds. I will definitely buy one soon (after winning the lottery).
Another approach to better coffee takes a completely different route—create it from cells grown in bioreactors. Environmentalists like this because the demand for sun-grown beans leads to destruction of rain forests. Per this Phys.Org heads-up, a Finnish team just released a recipe to accelerate the creation of a new “coffee ecosystem.” This seems promising. But there is a problem: Though the current lab-grown concoctions contain twice as much caffeine as ever before, it remains much lower than those in farmed beans.
Another approach to avoid the problems keeping up traditional methods for making coffee is to go to a beanless brew, such as the imitation now being rolled out by Seattle-based Atomo Coffee. Based on this January 24th report by CBS Saturday Morning show, I would be willing to give it a try, especially given they load up their brew with caffeine at the upper end of the normal range of real coffee. Full steam ahead!
One last idea (my caffeine levels now running low) for improving the taste of coffee is being selective about the shape and material of your cup. For example, see what the Perfect Daily Grind says about pouring your brew into a wine glass or other specialty containers.
“A drinking vessel has a significant impact on perception of flavour and aroma because it changes the way the coffee smells and tastes, as well as how you drink coffee. What’s more, our senses, feelings, and emotions also impact how we experience coffee.”
Marek Krupa, co-founder and CFO of Kruve
Never ending quest for the perfect grind of coffee
Posted by mark in food science, pop on June 12, 2023
This graphic illustration from the National Coffee Association provides some amazing statistics in support of the claim that their beverage reigns supreme. I am doing more than my per ‘cupita’ (pun intended) of the nearly half a billion mugs of coffee that Americans drink every day.
Back before we all started working from home during the pandemic and kept on doing so afterwards, my son Hank (now VP of Software Development) and most of our Stat-Ease colleagues jived on java (the real stuff, not the coding language). He and our lead statistician Martin Bezener (now President) conducted a very sophisticated experiment on coffee-grinding, as reported by him in our September 2016 Stat-Teaser. Check out Hank’s dramatic video-detailing of the split-plot coffee experiment.
With the aid of Design-Expert® software’s powerful statistical tools, Martin discovered the secret for making delicious coffee: Use a burr, not a blade, grinder, and go for the finest granulation. Based on these findings, I upgraded my grinder to the highly-rated Baratza Encore, which works really well (though very noisy!).
However, a new study published this May in a Special Issue on Food Physics reveals an uneven extraction in coffee brewing. Evidently, “a complicated interplay between an initial imbalance in the porosities and permeabilities” creates “a cutoff point” where “grinding coffee more finely results in lower extraction.” Along the same lines, but with open content and some nice pictures and graphs to lighten up a lot of dense math (e.g., Navier-Stokes equations for fluid dynamics), see this earlier publication on Systematically Improving Espresso. It “strongly suggests that inhomogeneous flow is operative at fine grind settings, resulting in poor reproducibility and wasted raw material.”
So now that experiments show that finer may not always be better, the quest for the perfect grind continues!
What happens if you walk backward while carrying a cup of coffee?
Posted by mark in pop, Uncategorized on October 1, 2017
One would assume that walking backward with coffee, especially when it’s piping hot, would be nearly as dangerous as running with scissors. Not so, according to the 2017 Ig Nobel Prize winning study for Fluid Dynamics. According to Korean physicist Jiwon Han, you will likely spill less walking backward than forward. However, your chances of tripping, or crashing into a colleague (also walking backward with coffee, ha ha) “drastically increase”.*
“Rarely do we manage to carry coffee around without spilling it once. In fact, due to the very commonness of the phenomenon, we tend to dismiss questioning it beyond simply exclaiming: ‘Jenkins! You have too much coffee in your cup!’”
– Jiwon Han
As reported in this “SmartNews” post by Smithsonian Magazine, Han advises a claw-like grip on top of your cup, rather than using the handle. Other tips from University of California researchers, reported here by LiveScience, are to gradually accelerate to a very slow walk, thus avoiding disruptive oscillations, and keep your eyes on the cup, not the ground.
My secret to stop spillage is to use a very large cup and fill it only two-thirds of the way, e.g., 12 ounces of hot coffee in a 16-ounce Styrofoam cup. The ultimate solution is to use a spill-proof, lidded container. However, I prefer drinking from a cup, if possible.
*(Source: Chemical and Engineering News, 9/18/17, Newscripts—“Curating quirky science since 1943.”)
Making coffee to the most by taking on the roast
The “Everyday Cheapskate,” Mary Hunt, advised this week that the more you learn about coffee the less, you’ll spend. I went high-tech some years ago with Cuisinart’s Automatic Grind & Brew Thermal ™. It makes great coffee and preserves it well by percolating directly into a stainless steel carafe. I get up early for a fresh-made cup and set the remainder at bed-side for my wife to enjoy as an eye-opener. She was the one who pointed out Hunt’s article to me, which suggested that roasting your own beans makes the brew “infinitely better tasting” at half the price. That is good, because after reading this, I immediately bought a $400 Swissmar Bravi and fired it up this weekend — the distinctive, but not unpleasant, smell of roasted coffee fills my home as I write. (My daughter thought I’d been boiling down maple syrup.)
The Bravi manufacturer leaves nothing to chance. For example, in the coffee roaster’s product guide they begin by saying “Keep the instructions (sic) manual.” The Swissmar engineers then specify that their customers “always use exactly one-half pound (225 g)…no more, no less.”** The machine offers a variety of roasting levels to a maximum of “Espresso,” which “comes very close to the edge of ruin.” Taking no chances, I went far lower than that extreme roast my first time around!
The moment of truth will come tomorrow morning when I make coffee with my home-roasted beans (Sumatra Mandheling). It had better be good, because I figure that, given the $6 per pound savings in beans and assuming a production rate of 40 cups of coffee per pound, the payback period will be two years. If the brew gets a “boo,” that will seem like an eternity to a ‘caffiend’ like me.
*Coffee trees produce a red “cherry” that peels back to the core green-bean
**At Ubersite, which “capitalizes on random, chaotic, unpredictable, flexible, bizarre human behavior,” I found these humorous comments (censored) on whether one ought to bother weighing:
I’m too lazy to actually measure the coffee out, so I just dump some in and try to visually judge how much I’ll need to brew a pot. Each day I stare while it’s brewing, tingling with anticipation… “today it’s going to be perfect.” No matter what, I either get really strong goo, or light brown water. Wouldn’t I be so much happier if I just measured?
The righteous way, and the path to true enlightenment, is to judge for yourself. As you hone your senses and your appreciation of the subtleties of coffee concentration increases, you will journey on a remarkable voyage of self discovery. You will see things that are invisible to the unenlightened eye. This will lead to a greater understanding of being. However, if you are fluctuating between brown water and syrupy goo, then I suggest you measure. You are a dingbat.
No. You will never achieve Zen-like coffee by measuring. The only way is trial and error. I know, I have achieved UberCoffee.