Electricity can be the key to a good cup of coffee

University of Oregon chemist Christopher Hendon loves his coffee—so learning all that goes into making the perfect cup is a big part of his research. His latest project: finding new ways to measure the taste of coffee by sending an electrical current through other beverages. The results appear in a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications.

We did they have been following Hendon’s work for several years now. For example, in 2020, the Hendon lab he helped make it the mathematical model for making the perfect cup of espresso, over and over again, is to minimize waste. Espresso flavors come from about 2,000 different flavors that come out of the coffee during roasting. So it can be difficult for baristas to reproduce the same perfect cup over and over again.

That’s why Hendon and his colleagues built their model to easily measure the so-called yield (EY): the fraction of coffee that dissolves into the final drink. This also depends on controlling the flow of water and the pressure of the water when the water is crushed in the coffee grounds. The model is based on the way lithium ions diffuse through the battery voltage, similar to how caffeine molecules dissolve from coffee.

Three years later, Hendon’s team began to think about why particles form in the first place, especially in the best parts. The trigger is the static electricity that results from the crushing and friction between the beans during grinding. Hendon thought that reducing static would be a good way to get rid of the bullets. The technical term is triboelectricitywhich comes from the accumulation of opposite electric currents on the surface of two different materials due to contact.

This type of reconstruction also occurs during volcanic eruptions. So Hendon teamed up with volcanologists Josef Dufek and Joshua Méndez Harper, who were regulars at the same local coffee house and saw a great similarity between the science of coffee and volcanic ash water, magma, and water.

Their experiments he confirmed that adding one squirt of water to the coffee beans before grinding can significantly reduce the static electricity for the following reasons. This also reduces over-flow during the brewing process, resulting in less waste and a more consistent flow for a delicious cup of espresso. Good baristas already use the water trick; it is known as Ross droplet method. But this is the first time that scientists have tried hard to hack the well-known and measure the true value of different types of coffee.