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Graduate student MACKENZIE BATALI, Professor CARLITO LEBRILLA, Professor JEAN-XAVIER GUINARD, and Professor WILLIAM D. RISTENPART share surprising results of “fractionation” experiments at UC Davis exploring the natural sweetness of black drip brew coffee in partnership with the SCA and Breville Corporation.
If you talk to aficionados of specialty coffee, however, you quickly learn that other sensory attributes are paramount. In fact, a word you are likely to hear from coffee experts, often uttered in reverential tones, is sweetness.
Typical consumers associate sweetness in coffee with the act of stirring in sugar or artificial sweetener, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. Rather, coffee experts have long known that black coffee, without any additives, can have perceptible sweetness. Considered by many to be the holy grail of specialty coffee, natural sweetness is a sublime pleasure for those who get to enjoy it in the cup. At the same time, however, natural sweetness can be maddening to those who need to make it happen. Anybody who sources, roasts, or brews coffee professionally knows that delivering natural sweetness in black coffee isn’t easy: sweetness is fleeting, fluctuating from lot to lot of beans or in response to minor differences in roast or brew conditions. This difficulty raises an important question: How do you maximize the natural sweetness in black coffee?
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