Skilled baristas know that achieving the perfect complex flavor profile for a delectable shot of espresso is as much art as science. Get it wrong, and the resulting espresso can taste too bitter or sourly acidic rather than being a perfect mix of each. Now, as outlined in a new paper in the journal Matter, an international team of scientists has devised a mathematical model for brewing the perfect cup, over and over, while minimizing waste.
[...]There's actually an official industry standard for brewing espresso, courtesy of the Specialty Coffee Association
[...]most coffee shops don't follow this closely, typically using more coffee, while the brewing machines allow baristas to configure water pressure, temperature, and other key variables to their liking.
[...]"Most people in the coffee industry are using fine-grind settings and lots of coffee beans to get a mix of bitterness and sour acidity that is unpredictable and irreproducible," said Hendon, a computational chemist at the University of Oregon.
[...]the group's experiments, revealed that if coffee is ground too finely, it can clog the coffee bed, thereby reducing extraction yield. It's also a big factor in the variability in taste. The researchers concluded that there are better methods for maximizing extraction yield, such as using fewer beans and coarser grinds with a bit less water. And the Specialty Coffee Association might be interested to hear that brew time is largely irrelevant.
[...]"Though there are clear strategies to reduce waste and improve reproducibility, there is no obvious optimal espresso point," said Hendon. "There is a tremendous dependency on the preferences of the person producing the coffee; we are elucidating the variables that they need to consider if they want to better navigate the parameter space of brewing espresso."
[...]"The real impact of this paper is that the most reproducible thing you can do is use less coffee," said Hendon. "If you use 15 grams instead of 20 grams of coffee and grind your beans coarser, you end up with a shot that runs really fast but tastes great. Instead of taking 25 seconds, it could run in 7 to 14 seconds. But you end up extracting more positive flavors from the beans, so the strength of the cup is not dramatically reduced. Bitter, off-tasting flavors never have a chance to make their way into the cup."
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/01/the-math-of-brewing-a-better-espresso/
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by aristarchus on Thursday January 23 2020, @12:16PM (9 children)
Just, Wow! Another paradigm smashing Soylent front-page article! Wow!
(Score: 4, Touché) by Bot on Thursday January 23 2020, @12:22PM
Hey hey, if you don't like SN submissions, just submit your stories instead.
(yep, I just trolld)
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 23 2020, @12:52PM (5 children)
Would you have approved if there had been a right-wing conspiracy instead?
(Score: 3, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday January 23 2020, @01:36PM (4 children)
You're not paying enough attention. He almost certainly thinks it is.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Funny) by c0lo on Thursday January 23 2020, @01:51PM (3 children)
You are being illogical.
If the magister thought this is a right-wing conspiracy article, he wouldn't have called it "paradigm smashing Soylent front-page article" - because, clearly, the right-wing conspiracies are the norm for S/N front-page articles. (large grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday January 23 2020, @03:05PM (2 children)
Heh, not bad. I'd +1 Funny you but I'm out of mod points until 00:10 UTC.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday January 23 2020, @03:17PM (1 child)
Appreciated, but don't bother, I clown for free (grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @10:45AM
Surefire way to tell an amateur's performance will be awkwardly bad: they will perform for free, and are not a teenager.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 23 2020, @05:01PM
Finally, aristocraticus can say his barista skills are a science.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Thursday January 23 2020, @07:05PM
How is caffeine not important to geeks?
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday January 23 2020, @12:27PM (9 children)
Have they considered the variability in water? because the same coffee brewed with the same "moka" in two different places tastes different.
I also don't get why it shouldn't be bitter. I live near the second region king of espresso, the city of Trieste (first one is Naples, the rest of Italy and some France riviera is good to OK, the rest of the world is kinda hopeless) and nobody complains an espresso is too bitter, ever.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday January 23 2020, @12:41PM
Oh wait, the rest of the world excluding brazil, which is the king, OFC.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2, Funny) by c0lo on Thursday January 23 2020, @01:55PM (1 child)
Mate, let me tell you a secret: if you brew two coffee cups reusing the same grounds, the two will taste different even if you brew them in the same place (grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday January 23 2020, @02:08PM
>reusing coffee grounds
I guess this won't be happening around here unless global thermonuclear war is under way.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Thursday January 23 2020, @02:26PM (1 child)
I'm having my "double-shot espresso** with half" (a teaspoon of sugar) in Melbourne [google.com] brewed by, in my case, either a Brazilian or a Colombian barista (too lazy to walk to the city lanes to get to the Italian ones). Tell ya, it's strong enough that if you stick a nail in my coffee, it will stand straight. Yet it's full of flavor and not a note of sourness in it.
The excellent local coffee roasters and the amount of coffee consumed here guarantees always freshly roasted beans. Search for cities with best coffee in the world [google.com] and you'll find Melbourne among them. Many will mention Melbourne as a serious contender to the "coffee capital of the world" in terms of coffee culture.
---
** if I'm not mistaken, the Italians call it "doppio"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday January 23 2020, @11:24PM
I took a time machine and answered you in #947350.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 23 2020, @02:35PM (1 child)
Water variablility is not a small effect. Particularly when you are talking about running waterh through very dark Maillard reaction products. Hundreds of years of beer brewing has empirically sorted this out. Regions with high carbonate water found that they needed to lower the pH of the water to brew better beer, which they accomplished by adding dark malts, and in fact, they could not brew the light style beers that became all the rage in the 19th century because their water was too hard. However, the Czechs brew wonderfully delicious light beers because they have essentially no minerals in their water. All the big international breweries make their money on light style beers, and they brew them all over the world, and they do that by essentially starting with demineralized water and adding in the salts and minerals they need to brew the kind of beer they want to brew.
If they really want to talk about how to make consistent espresso, they need to address what chemicals or dilutions they need to treat the water they brew with. A good place to start is to find the areas of the world that are known for the best espresso and looking at the chemical makeup of their water.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 24 2020, @03:07AM
Also, keep in mind that coffee is mostly water. More so with regular brews than espresso, but even with espresso, there's relatively little actual bean in the brew compared with the water.
In other words, if you're going to do one thing to get better coffee, you should look at the water.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 23 2020, @03:21PM
I noticed that the water from a Panasonic alkaline water purifier seems to extract stuff from Japanese green tea bags faster (even when the water is at room temperature).
While I'm a bit skeptical of the health benefits of alkaline water, there does seem to be a difference for cold brewing tea.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Thursday January 23 2020, @07:14PM
This reminds me of the myths about New York City water and the taste of bagels and pizza crust.
Results range from Yes, to iduno, to no.
https://www.foodandwine.com/news/new-york-water-bagels-pizza [foodandwine.com]
https://qz.com/263351/the-secret-of-new-york-citys-mythic-bagel-baking-water/ [qz.com]
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/05/21/405190434/chew-on-this-the-science-of-great-nyc-bagels-its-not-the-water [npr.org]
But if you use shitty water, whatever you make out of it is going to taste like shit.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 23 2020, @12:48PM (1 child)
... you can use an abacus.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 23 2020, @08:29PM
Oddly enough I just finished reading "Lipton's Autobiography" (available used from, for example, https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/lipton%27s-autobiography/ [abebooks.com] ). When Tom Lipton added tea to the items sold in his Lipton stores (hundreds of stores, all over England in the late 1800s), he and his team soon discovered that different tea blends were required depending on the water available in different parts of the country. Lipton tea was always low priced (due to volume purchasing, factory packaging and other economies), but often won taste competitions... back then.
Makes sense that coffee (and beer) would be the same.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 23 2020, @04:02PM (3 children)
May as well use a clean drip percolator then.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 23 2020, @08:53PM (1 child)
Or just coat the whole beans with dark chocolate and eat them by the handful, the way God intended.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday January 23 2020, @09:12PM
It does seem to be pretty natural. https://www.food.com/recipe/chocolate-covered-coffee-beans-72574 [food.com]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 1) by evilcam on Friday January 24 2020, @03:11AM
Full disclosure: I consider myself a coffee wanker, and I really don't mind the bitterness of an espresso...
I've got a relatively expensive (mid-high end machine) lever machine (La Pavoni Europiccola) paired with a decent grinder (Rancilio Rocky) and I find that if I have a coarse grind, I really struggle to get a crema when pulling a shot.
Recently I've tried to eradicate burnt coffee and introduce more consistency into my morning brew by weighing the amount of ground coffee that goes into the basket and even busting out the bathroom scales to measure how much pressure I'm tamping with. I've found that finer grind (#4 on my grinder) with a medium tamp (like 10-15kg) and 12g of coffee is giving good results (i.e. 2-3mm) in terms of crema, but still no where near the 15mm I'd get from a cafe here in Australia. If I want a thick, creamy top, then I have to up the dosage and the tamp pressure to the point where I can barely pull the lever doown and I end up with a horribly burnt coffee...
Anyways I find it interesting that TFA or the linked paper doesn't seem to mention crema at all... Maybe I'm just a clueless snob?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 24 2020, @12:31AM (1 child)
I think a lot of this is basic chemistry (well, physical chemistry to be technical). When doing extractions you will be able remove much more material out of one solution into another using much less of the solution that you are extracting to by using less of the second solution for each iteration (sorry, it’s been years since I’ve taken chem so I can’t remember the correct terms used). My chem lab book even has formulas that you can use to crunch the numbers but I’m not at home now.
And in my chem classes we did these sorts of extractions and the lab book does have well established recommendations on how to do this. So none of this is really new.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 24 2020, @06:13AM
Also I forgot the mention the disadvantage of using less of the second solution each time is that you would need to conduct the extraction more times which takes more time. So you have to figure out what you want to save, material or time.