March 2021 – Bean Thinking

coffee Coromandel Coast, Indian Shade grown coffee — The coffee from Coromandel Coast. Chocolate, ginger and nougat. I got the chocolate and the nougat, though the taste profile changed quite significantly between brewing by a V60 or an Aeropress

The coffee from Coromandel Coast arrived in a box, in bags that were suitable for industrial composting, each printed with an elephant on the packaging. The elephant is the logo of Coromandel Coast and is a nod to the fact that all of their coffees (which include single origins and blends) originate in India. All of the coffees have been shade grown which helps with the carbon footprint of the coffee, hence the slogan “Climate solution in your cup”. Which means that it would have been easy to do a coffee-physics review based on the different ways that coffee can be grown and why shade grown coffee can be part of a climate solution for coffee. But that would have been too quick; one of the motivations for cafe-physics reviews (and the related coffee-physics reviews) is to slow down and explore how sitting down and contemplating a cafe (or just coffee) can lead to so many different but connected thought trains. Given that your attention is drawn to the issues of climate change, and what you can do, from the instant you order from Coromandel Coast, this seems to be too obvious, even if an incredibly useful, thought train. So, if you would like to follow that thought train while contemplating the coffee you are drinking, you can read more about the environmental impact of coffee growing here or here and the importance of shade grown coffee here. An alternative thought train may be provided by the elephants.

I purchased two coffees from Coromandel Coast: Ganga and Chalukya. The Ganga was a washed catuai peaberry coffee with tasting notes of “chocolate, ginger and nougat”. The chocolate definitely comes through when brewed in the V60 and the pureover while the Aeropress produces a somehow cleaner taste profile that I find characteristic of washed coffees. Coromandel Coast was established in 2017-8 and is both a coffee roaster and a cafe based in Croydon. All of the packaging is recyclable or compostable, including the box it arrives in which is additionally re-usable (and will be reused again a couple of times before it is eventually recycled).

The elephant stamp. Is every copy identical? Could we use one elephant to understand the others?

The ink-stamped elephant on the box is a nice touch and echoed on the coffee bags. You could perhaps start to think about ink printing, dyes and the invention of the printing press, there are plenty of thought-paths that open themselves out. But a chance conversation over the coffee provided a different direction into the ways in which physics is taught at schools.

It appears that the school of my interlocutor that day initiated the physics course with a very boring set of classes on units. I was asked that morning: why would the teacher have started teaching physics with such a boring set of lessons? But I wondered a separate question, how can units be boring? How sad that they were made to be so. For although they are of fundamental importance in how we explore and understand our world, and could perhaps be quite dry, they can also link elephants to the Sun and to the work we now do to understand coffee better. For if we start with elephants, it was a favourite unit of my physics teacher. Used for all manner of things when we omitted to include the units in our answers. Consider the coffee: it comes in bags of 250 what? 250 elephants? or 250 grammes? The elephant became a unit of frustration for the lack of stated proper units. But we can push the Coromandel Coast elephant link a bit further, for each elephant on the packet is an ink-stamped copy. They are different but identical, they serve as a standard.

neon sign, light emission — Light is emitted from different chemicals at certain, definite wavelengths. This is an effect you will have seen on many a high street in these neon signs where the colour is determined by the composition of the gas within the sign. We can use the reverse of this to identify chemicals based on what wavelengths they absorb. But to do that, we need to know that we are all measuring in the same units.

And the standards are important for units because we need to know that we are all measuring the same thing. When Anders Angstrom was measuring the absorption and emission spectra of the Sun and of different gases, he quoted the absorption lines in units of 1/10 of a nanometre (a unit now called the Angstrom). Different gasses will absorb (or emit) light at very specific frequencies or wavelengths. Being a very careful experimentalist, Angstrom had ensured that his measurements of the wavelengths that were absorbed or emitted were checked against the standard measure of length of the day, the metre. But at the time, the metre was defined by the length of a metal rod stored in Paris. All other standards of the metre were copies of this original one, including the metre kept at Uppsala where Angstrom was doing his experiments. An issue with metals is that they will age. With time you will get some shrinkage and some expansion owing to the formation of oxides etc. on the metal. The metre in Paris had aged in a different way to that in Uppsala which was just a tiny bit shorter than the Paris metre*. These differences would not be noticeable were Angstrom measuring the size of elephants, but instead he was concerned with measurements that were one ten-billionth of a metre. And at this scale, it mattered a great deal. Angstrom was aware of the systematic error in his results but it wasn’t until after his death that the error was fully hunted down and corrected for.

The position of the lines that Angstrom had been measuring reveal the chemical composition of the gases, and so knowing whether a line appears at 700 or 710 nm, reveals information about the chemical studied. We still use these spectroscopy techniques, not just for understanding gases, but also for checking the composition of medicines and for understanding the differences between Arabica and Robusta coffees. Which brings us back to the coffee, for while we no longer use a physical measure of length as our standard metre, we still use a standard definition of the metre that allows us to compare coffees and stellar spectra. It also allows us to appreciate the beauty in the uniformity of an ink-stamped elephant on a box housing an interesting and flavourful, climate sensitive, coffee.

You can order from Coromandel Coast here, or (post-lockdown) visit the cafe at Filtr, 53 Limpsfield Road, S. Croydon,, CR2 9LB

*To read more about the history of the definitions of units including the metre, click here. This anecdote was originally recorded in a book that I do not have physical access to at the moment owing to coronavirus restrictions. As soon as I get the name/author of the book, I’ll include it here.

Thought bubble

inverted Aeropress and coffee stain — A problematic inversion with the Aeropress. This brew method offers plenty of physics connections for those who look.

The Aeropress is not a brewing technique that creates many bubbles on the surface of a coffee. Unlike the crema of an espresso or the iridescent bubbles on top of a black coffee prepared using a cafetiere, the surface of an Aeropress coffee could be thought of as a bit, well, dull. The paper filter within the Aeropress removes many of the oils while this calm brew method generally does not create the turbulence needed to produce bubbles that cling to the side of the resultant cup. Yet it is this brew method that can provide a bubble link to climate change and coffee roasting, and to see why, we need to pay careful attention to our brew.

Although there are many techniques for brewing with the Aeropress (you could try the guide here or here), one step common to most brew guides is that you will need to rinse the paper filter in the basket before you brew. The rinsing step removes a potential paper-y taste from the filter as well as helping it to stay fixed in position (the reason for this could be the subject of another post). Importantly for this particular post though, it also traps air within the holes of the filter, which you can see in the photograph.

The bubble is trapped owing to the strong surface tension of the water dripping from the basket. You could perhaps test this by adding soap to your brewing water in order to reduce the surface tension and watching to see if the number of trapped air bubbles you produce decreases. Or perhaps there are limits to what you are prepared to do with coffee in order to see some physics. Whichever way, the fact that the bubble is there at all can lead us down several thought alleys.

Perhaps we start to think about air that is trapped within water. In a way, this air is characteristic of what is around us now: the pollutants, the oxygen level etc. Which, while it may seem an obvious statement has an immediate consequence. Air that is trapped in water that is then frozen remains as a record of the composition of the air at the exact point of time that it was trapped. So if layers of ice form trapping layers of bubbles of air, and this happens for many years, we can analyse the composition of the trapped air bubble to discover what the atmosphere was like 100, 1000 or 100 000 years ago. This offers a way of understanding how concentrations of carbon dioxide, for example, have varied over the millennia.

An example of air bubbles within the Aeropress filter. In addition to the long bubble caused by incorrect filter placement, you can see two air bubbles in the hollows of the plastic basket under the paper filter (circled with a dotted red line).

But maybe your mind stays with the coffee: what about air bubbles within a coffee bean? In order to turn the green coffee bean into the aromatic substance that we all appreciate, it needs to be roasted. Roasting coffee is a fantastic mix of science and art: using the knowledge of what happens during roasting and applying (and playing with) that knowledge to produce great tasting coffees. At its core, the roasting process involves heating the beans for a certain amount of time in order for the water to come out of the green bean, the sugars to turn in the Maillard reactions and for the various aromatics to develop chemically. The green bean also undergoes physical changes. The colour is altered, the bean expands and the internal gases (first water, then carbon dioxide) build up pressure within the bean and then crack open some of the cell structures during roasting. And while this sounds fairly simple, there are ‘arts’ involved in roasting: how long do you let the beans dry? How fast do you take the bean through the Maillard processes? Do you let the beans cool slowly or cool them really fast to stop any further chemical reactions immediately? Each of these has effects on the final flavour of the bean, some which are fairly similar across the industry, some which rely much more on the creativity and discernment of the roaster.

There are obvious analogues to materials physics and materials chemistry. In order to make the different materials that are studied, raw materials are often heated to a high temperature and left for a significant time before either being cooled slowly or suddenly, by quenching. There is the science: the temperature at which different reactions occur and the way that materials form together in order to produce grains that get larger as they are heated for longer. And then there is the art, how fast to heat, how long to leave it for, whether to cool or quench, even what gas should be used to flow over the forming compounds. Small differences in how the materials are heat treated can have large consequences on the applicability and strength of the final material, with applications from gear cogs to airplane engines.

Kamwangi and Gelana coffee under the microscope — A fluorescence microscope image magnified 20x of two types of coffee after roasting. The microstructure (including pore development) will depend on the type of coffee as well as the style of roasting.

To return to the coffee roasting, the effect of the temperature has a similar marked effect on the microstructure of the resultant bean which will have consequences for how the roast ages. For example, a study about 20 years ago showed the differences between coffee beans roasted to an equivalent level (measured by moisture loss and colour analysis of the roast) at two different temperatures. The physical properties of the final roasted beans were very different. Not only did the higher temperature (260C) roasted beans show a larger volume increase compared to the low temperature (220 ) roasted beans, the pore structures of the beans were also different. For the higher temperature roasts, larger micropores had opened up within the cell walls of the roasted coffee. These pores connected to regions deep within the bean that would otherwise be cut off from the air: trapped bubbles within the bean that, with the higher temperature roasting, now have a way of escaping to the outer surface. Indeed, one day after roasting, the authors of the study saw, under a microscope, many tiny spots of coffee oil seeping from the interior of the higher temperature roasted bean and to the surface.

This has consequences for how the bean will age after roasting and so how we as consumers will appreciate the drink. Roasting is a dark art indeed, and one that I’m grateful for the many skilful practitioners that we now have around. Roasters who help us to appreciate the flavour of our coffee, as well as the directions of thought it takes us on.