The Science Of Coffee

The Science Of Coffee: Coffee is a brewed drink from the roasted seeds of Coffea plants, and its stimulant caffeine works by blocking the brain's tiredness signals; it spread from Ethiopia and Yemen to become one of the most traded commodities and most consumed drinks on Earth.

Kaldi: The legend of the Ethiopian goat herder who noticed his goats dancing after eating coffee cherries wasn't written down until 1671, centuries after coffee drinking began.

Adenosine: This molecule builds up in the brain while you're awake and makes you sleepy, and caffeine works by fitting into its receptors and blocking the signal without activating it.

Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge: The German chemist first isolated caffeine in 1819 after the poet Goethe handed him a box of coffee beans and asked him to analyze them.

Gabriel de Clieu: The French naval officer smuggled a coffee seedling to Martinique in the 1720s and reportedly shared his own water ration with it during the voyage.

Francisco de Melo Palheta: Legend says he brought coffee to Brazil in 1727 after charming the French Guiana governor's wife, who hid seeds in a farewell bouquet; Brazil is now the world's largest producer.

Lloyd's of London: The insurance giant began in Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse in the 1680s, where ship owners and merchants met to share shipping news over coffee.

Coffea arabica: The world's most popular coffee species is a natural hybrid of two other coffee plants, giving it double the usual number of chromosomes.

Maillard Reaction: During roasting, sugars and amino acids react to create hundreds of aroma compounds, which is why green coffee beans smell grassy rather than like coffee.

Chlorogenic Acid: These antioxidants make up a large share of green coffee beans and break down during roasting, so darker roasts generally have fewer of them.

Kopi Luwak: Made from beans that pass through the digestive tract of the Asian palm civet, it is one of the world's most expensive coffees and is dogged by animal welfare concerns.

CYP1A2: Variations in this liver enzyme gene help explain why some people sleep fine after an espresso while others stay wired for hours.

Ludwig Roselius: The German merchant patented the first commercial decaffeination process in the early 1900s using benzene, a solvent now known to cause cancer.

Satori Kato: The Japanese chemist working in Chicago introduced a soluble instant coffee at the 1901 Pan American Exposition.

Achille Gaggia: His lever espresso machine in the late 1940s forced water through the grounds at high pressure, creating crema, which Italians at first suspected was scum.

Melitta Bentz: Fed up with bitter grounds in her cup, the German housewife invented the paper coffee filter in 1908 using blotting paper from her son's school notebook.

Gustav III of Sweden: Legend says the coffee hating king ordered one condemned twin to drink coffee daily and the other tea; the tea drinker died first and the coffee drinker outlived them both.

Johann Sebastian Bach: Around 1735 he wrote the Coffee Cantata, a comic piece about a young woman who refuses to give up her coffee habit for her disapproving father.

Loughborough University: Its sleep researchers found that drinking coffee right before a 15 minute nap beats either one alone, because the caffeine kicks in just as you wake.

Pope Clement VIII: Legend says advisers urged him to ban coffee as the devil's drink, but after tasting it he declared it too good to leave to unbelievers.

Murad IV: The Ottoman sultan banned coffeehouses in the 1630s as hotbeds of sedition and reportedly patrolled Istanbul in disguise to punish anyone caught drinking.

Christopher Hendon: The chemist's 2020 study showed that using slightly less coffee ground a bit coarser makes espresso more consistent and less wasteful.

Robert Deegan: His 1997 physics paper explained the coffee ring effect, where evaporation pulls particles to the edge of a spilled drop, a finding now used in printing and diagnostics.

Finland: Finns drink more coffee per person than any other nation, around 12 kilograms a year, and coffee breaks are written into many labor agreements.

Neal Freedman: His 2012 study of roughly 400,000 older Americans found coffee drinkers had a modestly lower risk of death over 13 years than non drinkers.