Science Behind The Perfect Cup Of Coffee

If you are a coffee person, your day probably won’t start before you brew that one tasty cup of sweet-smelling morning coffee. But to understand it, it’s important to look at what comprises a perfect cup of coffee.

Water is the absolutely key

Water quality has the strongest effect on the taste of coffee. Water composition is important to ensuring the right proportions of starches, bases, sugars and acids are extracted from the coffee bean roasts when preparing your coffee. The mineral composition of water has the biggest impact in the extraction of six different chemicals from coffee. Water, if rich in magnesium, does not improve the extraction of coffee bean flavours. Sodium along with bicarbonates, tends to mess up the taste. To make things right, low levels of bicarbonate and high levels of magnesium are stand out components in brewing a perfect cup of coffee.

The flavour of a cup of coffee is determined by the level to which the water extracts the chemicals from the ground beans, a process that is largely dependent on the grinding process, overall temperatures, roast profile, brew duration, and pressure. So, different filtration techniques and reasonably hard tap water are the best ways to get the right cup of coffee.

And then, there is the smell

Most of what we taste in coffee is really its smell. If you prevent yourself from smelling the coffee, a cup would only taste sour or bitter. Just try to hold your nose the next time you take your first sip.

Roasted coffee has about 20 major compounds, but it is the influence of the many minor compounds that provides the overall taste that we get to love so much. The smell that we know as “coffee” is a combination of hundreds of different smells given off by by the compounds in the coffee.

What It Takes to get that perfect cup of Coffee?

There are five important operations that you can control to brew the perfect cup of coffee:

1. The coarseness of the grind: The optimum grind of coffee beans, is somewhere between the finely ground powder and the very coarse beans.

2. The temperature during the extraction: When you use boiling water it causes the caffeine and organic acids, to be extracted faster which results in high levels of caffeine and bitter organic acids.

3. The duration of the extraction: If we keep the coarseness of the ground coffee beans and brewing temperature constant, we can influence the amounts of these elements by playing with the duration of the brewing time.

4. The coffee to water ratio: Too little will taste weak and too much is overpoweringly strong. The ideal ratio of water to coffee is your choice of extraction method, along with the factors listed in this list.

In conclusion, to make the perfect cup of morning coffee, the method is fairly simple. Grind the beans to the right coarseness, try and match the temperature of the water along with the duration of extraction, while adjusting the coffee to water ratio depending on the extraction method. Not that easy, isn’t it?

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