Last week, a new study was published that explored the mathematics behind brewing the perfect filter coffee. The research, summarised here, modelled the brewing process as being composed of a quick, surface extraction from the coffee grounds, coupled with a slower brew, where the water was able to get into the interior of the coffee grind. It was an interesting study and the authors are now looking at grind shape and the effect of how you wet the grounds. However, what struck me was that the authors mentioned scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images of ground coffee. A lovely idea, what does coffee look like when magnified hundreds (or thousands) of times?
So here are a few images that I found shared under Creative Commons Licenses. I hope you find them as fascinating as I do.
1) A green coffee bean:
A green coffee bean. Sadly no details as to magnification. Image shared under CC license from Nestle, Flickr
2) Instant Coffee
Spray dried instant coffee from the Nestle, Flickr account. Image shared under CC license.
3) Roast and ground coffee (fluorescence microscopy image)
Ever wondered what your coffee looked like when magnified many times? This image using fluorescence microscopy is of roasted coffee. Note the similarities between this image and the following one (which has a scale bar). Image shared under CC license from Nestle, Flickr
3b) More ground, roasted coffee, this time from Zeiss
Scanning electron microscope image of roast (and ground) coffee magnified 750x. Image from Zeiss, Flickr, Todd Simpson, UWO Nanofabrication Facility. Shared under CC license. (To put the scale bar in perspective, it is the size of the smallest particles in an espresso grind. Clearly, the grind here is quite coarse).
4) Finally, an image of tea, just to keep this article tea-coffee balanced:
Green tea as seen under the microscope by the scientists at Nestle. Shared under CC license Nestle, Flickr.
If you come across any great images of coffee (or tea) under the microscope, please do share them. In the meanwhile, enjoy your coffee however you brew it.
Are you a hedonist or a utilitarian when it comes to drinking coffee?
Which part of the process of making and drinking coffee do you enjoy most? How do you rate the importance of smell, taste, touch (even hearing and sight) to the enjoyment of the process of brewing your cup?
It appears that your answer to this question may well be affected by your motivation for drinking your coffee in the first place. Last year, a group of researchers from Switzerland published a study that investigated whether the reason that you drank coffee (i.e. either for sensory enjoyment or just for the caffeine kick) influenced your enjoyment of the experience of making and drinking the coffee.
The researchers looked at how the participants in the study rated their own levels of enjoyment and satisfaction as they progressed through four stages of making coffee.
Water heating
Jar handling*
Cup preparation
Cup drinking
The 60 participants were divided into two groups of 30, those who drank coffee for enjoyment (the hedonists), and those who drank for stimulation (the utilitarians). After checking that both groups of participants rated their levels of pleasure and satisfaction similarly before the experiment started (they did), the participants were repeatedly interrupted while they made their coffee and asked to rate their levels of enjoyment and the importance that they attached to different sensory experiences (smell, sight, touch etc).
A very enjoyable coffee, but which part of the process of making and drinking coffee do you enjoy most?
After stage 4, when both groups had finally managed to drink their coffees, both groups reported similar levels of enjoyment, satisfaction etc. The difference came in the process. Overall, the group that were drinking the coffee purely for stimulation found the experience of making coffee less pleasant than the group who drank coffee because they enjoyed it. Meaning, those that drank coffee because they liked the taste seemed to enjoy the entire process of making and then drinking the coffee more than those who were just looking for a pick-me-up. Moreover, the ‘hedonists’ also attached more importance to the satisfaction of the smell and the taste of the coffee than did the ‘utilitarians’. Interestingly though, vision played an important role throughout the whole process for both groups of participants.
So how much we enjoy the process of making coffee depends on why we are drinking coffee in the first place. What about you? How do you rate the time that you spend brewing your coffee (I think that we can extrapolate this to tea too)? Are you a hedonist, a utilitarian or somewhere in between and does it matter? Please share your thoughts either here, on FB, or on Twitter.
*The study was performed at the Nestlé Research Centre so presumably used instant, hence the ‘jar’. Does this affect the conclusions of the study for ‘speciality’ coffee drinkers? Are you a utilitarian speciality coffee drinker who nonetheless enjoys the entire process? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.
