Most coffee aficionados already know the key to a quality cup of coffee is the combination of beans and the grinding of the beans, and now science is backing up that statement.
According to a statement released by the University of Bath, you can enhance the flavor in that morning cup of goodness by chilling the beans slightly before grinding them. Getting a good grind, one in which the beans are ground finely to a uniform size, leads to better flavor. If the process of grinding could be improved, scientists were hoping to get a better tasting cup while using fewer beans for the mix.
The researchers tested their conclusions by examining the effect of temperature on the grinding process. The results revealed chilled beans resulted in a better post-grind consistency and ultimately, a better tasting brew.
The scientists say the finding could actually impact the coffee industry, by getting a flavor boost from fewer coffee beans being required to make that good-tasting cup.
“Grinding coffee may seem quite straightforward – break coffee up into a lot of tiny bits so you can dissolve it in water,” Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood, co-owner of Colonna & Smalls, said in the statement. “But like the whole world of coffee the subtleties of the process have a huge impact on the flavour and quality of the cup of coffee. The ability to understand grinding more comprehensively has the dual impact of allowing us to make better tasting coffee and to be more efficient in the way we do that.
The statement continued to say the temperature of the beans will need to be more constant, as their research is suggesting, and that will help achieve more consistent grinds of the beans. The researchers predicted we would see coffee competitors across the globe begin to look at this research and develop new grinding technologies.