Introducing: The Science of Coffee

James Harper

I love my morning coffee ritual.

In the corner of my kitchen, under a hanging plant and overlooking the road, I boil my water to 93 degrees.

I grind 31 grams of beans in my Weber Workshops key grinder, and I fold my filter paper to make a V60 drip coffee.

I delicately pour concentric circle of the concentric circle, and it drips, drips, drips down into a glass carafe.

And then, finally, I put this sweet, delicious brown brew to my lips, and I'm ready for the day.

But sometimes this ritual goes a bit off.

For example, sometimes I accidentally boil the water to 100 degrees, and as I pour it, I still get, you know, a brown liquid, but it ain't sweet, it's super, super bitter.

And sometimes I make the mistake of using tap water rather than filtered water, and my brew just tastes, you know, flat and chalky.

And over the years, I've experienced these moments over and over again, where I'm stood in the corner of my kitchen, I stare back at the Weber coffee grounds, and I start wondering to myself, what happened deep, deep, deep inside there, at almost like a, at a microscopic level that led to this cup tasting so weird?

And then the next thing I would do is take out my phone and type in coffee science into Google.

And I often come across two things, really dense, technical academic papers often behind paywalls, and then I scroll past like an endless stream of blogs and videos with a lot of science terms thrown around in them.

But the problem is, the authors are very rarely scientists, and the journalist in me keeps whispering, how credible is this?

And inevitably, after just a couple of minutes, Googling coffee science, I just give up.

And I've given up many, many times.

But one day I thought to myself, you know, I think I know how I can fix this.

I'm gonna take the time to just sit down and actually read scientific papers and textbooks.

I'm gonna travel across Europe and parts of Africa to speak with leading coffee scientists.

Coffee is really complicated, even more complicated, I would argue, than trying to understand what's going on in a nuclear reactor.

Prof. Chahan Yeretzian

So gas chromatography, liquid chromatography, size occlusion chromatography.

James Harper

And I'm gonna create the most interesting audio stories that I can that simply explains how it all actually works.

But I knew this was probably gonna take me maybe up to 500 hours of work.

So I found six sponsors who were at the top of their game and could help me explain coffee science better.

And after an entire year of work, I present to you, the science of coffee.

A journey into coffee's hidden microscopic secrets.

Across six episodes, we're gonna be exploring the science of genetics, water, espresso technology, latte foam, coffee extraction, and sonic seasoning.

Episodes will drop every two weeks or so on my Filter Stories channel.

But if you don't wanna wait, you can head over to my new podcast channel, The Science of Coffee, where very soon, you'll be able to hear the first three episodes all at once.

I can't wait to help you understand the science of coffee so you can start making even better coffee at home.