For your coffee to taste its best, it’s crucial you buy fresh roasts and grind fresh.… .….Or maybe not.  When I began creating this episode, I was convinced that ‘fresh is best’. But, after delving into the science of coffee freshness, I don’t believe that anymore.  This episode goes deep into how diffusion and oxidation changes a coffee’s flavours. You’ll learn what it takes to store your coffee grounds unbelievably well. So well, that if you do it right, you will struggle to taste the difference between two month old coffee compared to those same beans freshly ground! But here ..read more

In the last episode, I discovered that rinsing my Chemex filter papers was a waste of time! As a result I’ve managed to claw back over seven days of my life left on earth.  But why stop there?  The coffee industry is full of elaborate ways of brewing and savouring coffee: fancy drippers, cold metal balls, “slurp-able” cupping spoons. These are very fun, but how many of them actually affect the flavour of our coffee? I fear elaborate coffee gear is wasting our time and money. They're distracting us from the existential crises in coffee that actually require all our attention now ..read more

Should you rinse your filter paper before making a filter coffee? Almost everybody in coffee internet says you should.  But what if most of coffee internet was wrong? In this episode, I show you how I try to answer this question like a professional sensory scientist would.  It’s hard. It’s frustrating. But ultimately, it’s worth it because I end up saving seven days of my life left on earth! Please spread the word about The Science of Coffee! Discover how I make these Filter Stories episodes by subscribing to my Substack newsletter Leave a 5 star rating on Spotify Follow me on ..read more

Farming coffee organically is amazing because soils are more alive, birds and insects are more plentiful, farmers avoid getting sick with agrochemicals. But, if it’s so great, why is less than 10% of the world’s coffee grown organically? The fact is, going organic is hard. Much harder than growing coffee conventionally. In this episode I show you the story of one of Central America’s most successful organic coffee cooperatives, RAOS, and the four big hurdles that stood in the way of their early founders who all dreamed of converting their farms to organic. This story changed my understandi ..read more

The world’s farming soils are deteriorating quickly. Conventional coffee farming where plants are grown using agrochemicals allowed farmers to reap huge harvests these last 70 years. But these agrochemicals have been at the expense of soil health. I travel to Honduras to explore a potential solution: organic coffee farming. Come with me as I show you the organic farming tricks of Don Rufino, one of the region’s leading organic farmers. He nurtures the soil around his coffee trees using mountain microorganisms, a huge diversity of shade trees, attentive tree pruning, and very funky batches ..read more

Roasting coffee can be maddening. Just 4° Celsius is enough to make the same green beans taste distinctly different! And there are so many things roasters can play around with: temperature, time, fan speed, drum speed, types of probes…the list goes on and on. So, if you want to start roasting yourself, where do you start!? In the first half of this episode, I interview one of the world's leading roasting teachers who takes me through his published scientific research to give a clear answer. It’s as simple as 80%, 15% and 5%. And then, in the second half, I show you why roasting coffee consi ..read more

What flavours do you want from your coffee? Every coffee bean begins its life green. And if you brewed it up without first roasting it, you’d get a yellow-green cup of grass-flavoured water. But, as soon you apply heat to a bean, the flavour can morph to from something quite vegetative to a very acidic unripe fruit, then a very sweet fruit, and eventually dark roasted flavours. This is the magic of coffee roasting! In this episode of The Science of Coffee, I show you a full roast in action on the ROEST P3000, taste how coffee flavours evolve from acidic to bitter, and speak to leading coff ..read more

America is coffee-obsessed. From Central Perk’s red couch being the centre of major plot twists in Friends to the fact the average American drank more than two cups a day. And the conventional explanation is pretty straightforward: an English colonist introduces coffee to Jamestown in 1607. 150 years later Americans rebel against the British by throwing tea chests into Boston harbour and drinking coffee becomes their patriotic duty. Oh, and of course who won the civil war? The side that had the coffee. But, actually, the truth is much more surprising, and reveals a much more counter-intuitiv ..read more

One morning back in the ‘80s, Howard Schultz walks out of his Milan hotel, stumbles into an espresso bar, and fundamentally changes coffee history. He discovered (and then popularises) the iconic, timeless Italian coffee experience: Rich thick coffee, an affordable price and great theatre. But this Italian ritual is surprisingly young, so young that Howard Schultz was in school while some of it was being developed! In this third episode of Series Two of A History of Coffee, we show you why for most of Italy’s history, coffee was thin, expensive, dull to watch…and that’s if you were lucky en ..read more

A coffee shop is a lot more than just a place to drink coffee. The seats and sofas encourage you to invite a friend, and chat. And chatting is powerful: ideas that emerge from these caffeine-fuelled conversations give birth to modern finance and even the founding of great artistic and scientific institutions. Meanwhile, other ideas threaten those in power, and have led to many attempts to ban coffeeshops (and even coffee itself!) these last 500 years. In the first episode of Series Two of A History of Coffee, we show you how the coffee shop changed the world, and we ask whether it still has ..read more