Pauline Fujita was a typical grad student who spent many a night guzzling coffee and studying. Until one day, she realized that she loved the brew in the cup more than the info in the book. Thus, a graduate-student determination to figure out what makes coffee coffee.
Her paper, Science on a Grande Scale, was published more than two years ago in Litmus Magazine. But it's getting attention now, with more people turning to home-brewed coffee and wondering how to make it better.
Take, for instance, something as small as one notch on the grinder:
the distribution of sizes of coffeeFujita's biggest accomplishment is giving a name to the perfect crema on a head of espresso.grinds can mean the difference between a spiritual coffee experience
and trauma for your taste buds. The size of the grinds determines the
surface area of contact between the coffee and the hot water or steam
being used to extract the tasty compounds from the coffee.
She calls it "tiger skin," which is when the crema has small waves
formed "by tiny gas bubbles and cell wall fragments from the extracted
beans."
The wonderful aroma from coffee that I'm enjoying as I
type this is surprisingly not formed by the coffee gods but by
something called heat transfer physics. There's even a formula: Q = α ∫
SA * with the overall result -- Q -- being the heat energy and soon-to-be
aroma.
Even with mathematical formulas and the occasional
tangent into electron microscope analysis of coffee beans, the article
is written for Joey Everyone, especially those who are wondering how to
keep coffee fresher longer. (Hint: Forget freezing it, just keep air
out of it.)
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What I don't get are the tea lovers. I like tea but choosing tea over coffee, that's just wrong.
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