Math is the Solution to Your Perfectly Brewed Cup of Coffee

Coffee drinkers can now optimise their everyday experience with a mathematical approach to brewing coffee.

Maths is not just about complex calculations that made everyone cry back in school. Mathematicians are getting closer to understanding how to make the perfect cup of joe to give you your fix, according to a BBC report.

Scientists have used complex calculations to elaborate on the process of coffee extraction from grains in a filter machine.

Using this knowledge, coffee drinkers can optimise their everyday experience with this scientific approach to coffee brewing.

Coffee has over 1,800 chemical components and is one of the most widely consumed beverages in the world - more than a couple billion cups are savoured each day.

Scientists Kevin Moroney at the University of Limerick, William Lee at the University of Portsmouth and others have offered a better understanding of the parameters that influence the quality of the final brew.

Past studies have worked on the process of extracting coffee but few studies have been done on drip filter machines.

In these machines, hot water is poured over ground coffee in a filter. Gravity pulls the water through the filter and soluble compounds are extracted into the brew as the liquid seeps through the filter.

Our overall idea is to have a complete mathematical model of coffee brewing that you could use to design coffee machines, rather like we use a theory of fluid and solid mechanics to design racing cars.

Dr Lee

There are two ways of extracting coffee: a relatively fast method is extracting the coffee from the top of the grains and a slower one involves extracting it from within the ground coffee.

Now, however, the fine grounds vs bigger grounds debate has been debunked.

So now, rather than just saying: ‘I need to make [the grains] a bit bigger’, I can say: ‘I want this much coffee coming out of the beans, this is exactly the size [of grain] I should aim for.

This will help drinkers optimise their coffee drinking experience.

For industrial applications, we’d hope you could optimise the coffee machine for a certain size of grains. You could adjust the flow rate so you get the perfect extraction there.

Researchers are now planning to study the shape of the coffee bed in drip filter machines.

Source: BBC