We aim to understand coffee and secure its future through research, knowledge building, and outreach.

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Lead author SARA YEAGER shares the findings of a recently published paper, “Roast Level and Brew Temperature Significantly Affect the Color of Brewed Coffee,” published in the Journal of Food Science, exploring how coffee beverage color varies with origin, roast level, and brew temperature.

Watch the discussion on the SCA Youtube channel.

Part of an ongoing body of research from the UC Davis Coffee Center, this lecture will explore how temperature, at a fixed total dissolved solids and percent extraction, impacts the quality of drip brew coffee as assessed by an expert panel. In addition, we discuss how the work serves a broader goal to expand and update the classic Coffee Brewing Control Chart with more detailed sensory language, and how we can use these results to brew better coffee.

Presented By: Mackenzie Batali, Graduate Student Researcher, University of California, Davis

Watch the discussion on the SCA Youtube channel.

Part of an ongoing body of research from the UC Davis Coffee Center, this lecture will explore how temperature, at a fixed total dissolved solids and percent extraction, impacts the quality of drip brew coffee as assessed by an expert panel. In addition, we discuss how the work serves a broader goal to expand and update the classic Coffee Brewing Control Chart with more detailed sensory language, and how we can use these results to brew better coffee.

Presented By: Mackenzie Batali, Graduate Student Researcher, University of California, Davis

Read the full article on the SCA Portal.

Lead author Dr. MACKENZIE BATALI shares the results of a controlled and systematic study exploring the impact of the cold brew process on the sensory profile of the beverage it produces, recently published in MDPI’s open access journal, Foods.

Read the full article on the SCA Portal.

The SCA’s Content Development Manager, Laurel Carmichael, speaks to researchers at the Hendon Coffee Lab about their chemistry lab that looks like a café, and about how they use electrochemistry and Design of Experiments to better understand the complexities of espresso extraction.

Read the full academic publication.

The process of grinding coffee generates particles with high levels of electrostatic charge, causing a number of detrimental effects including clumping, particle dispersal, and spark discharge. At the brewing level, electrostatic aggregation between particles affects liquid-solid accessibility, leading to variable extraction quality. In this study, we quantify the effectiveness of four charge mitigation strategies. Our data suggests that adding small amounts of water to whole beans pre-grinding, or bombarding the grounds with ions produced from a high-voltage ionizer, are capable of de-electrifying the granular flows. While these techniques helped reduce visible mess, only the static reduction through water inclusion was found to impact the brewing parameters in espresso format coffee. There, wetting coffee with less than 0.05 mL / g resulted in a marked shift in particle size distribution, in part due to preventing clump formation and also liberating fine particles from sticking to the grinder. With all other variables kept constant, this shift resulted in at least 15% higher coffee concentration for espresso extracts prepared from darker roasts. These findings pose financial and sustainability implications, and encourage the widespread implementation of water use to de-electrify coffee during grinding.

Watch a lecture from Re:co, the Specialty Coffee Symposium, 2023 by Prof. Christopher H. Hendon.

As technology advances and our understanding of sensory attributes improves, it's possible to put more power in the hands of coffee professionals who seek to make coffee better. Get the latest update about this multi-year research project aimed at measuring espresso chemistry, correlating those measurements to sensory attributes, and laying the groundwork for science-based useable tools for the coffee industry.