An inconsistent cup of coffee can make or break your day — but new research is shedding light on just how the industry can dial up the production process for a more reliable flavor.
University of Oregon researchers repurposed a tool called a potentiostat, typically used to test batteries, to send an electrical current through coffee.
Through this simple process, they were able to identify coffee’s “chemical fingerprint” that determines the drink’s flavor.
“It’s an objective way to make a statement about what people like in a cup of coffee,” university chemist Christopher Hendon, the lead researcher known around campus as “Dr. Coffee,” said in a news release.
Traditional tests mainly focus on measuring the strength of coffee. Yet many other factors go into the way coffee tastes, including roast color and extraction strength.
The team’s research shows how to move beyond measuring the strength of coffee alone to produce a more complete flavor profile cafés can replicate.
“The reason you have an enjoyable cup of coffee is almost certainly that you have selected a coffee of a particular roast color and extracted it to a desired strength,” Hendon said.
“Until now, we haven’t been able to separate those variables. Now we can diagnose what gives rise to that delicious cup.”
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During testing, the researchers used four samples from the same English roaster and were able to identify a defective sample that had failed the roaster’s quality control, despite the identical appearance of all the batches.
“In the short term, we hope this is something that will make a difference in coffee shops and in the coffee industry,” Hendon said.
These findings, which the researchers published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications, are remarkable, but they will take some time to drip down to the consumer, said Bryan Quoc Le, a consulting food scientist and founder and CEO of California-based Mendocino Food Consulting.
“[The science] still relies on expensive components to make it work into a feasible technology,” Le told Fox News Digital.
“The interesting bit here is that now we have a way to access the subjective quality in the taste and flavor of coffee using quantifiable measurements. Which means we could start seeing a serious improvement in the coffee game across all coffee shops over the years.”
