Want Tastier Coffee? Freeze Beans Before Grinding

Percolator, French press, AeroPress, espresso, pour over, vacuum pot, automatic brew, tin can: People go to great lengths for a good cup of coffee. But to achieve consistent flavor you may just need to chill your beans before grinding them. Colder beans produce smaller, more consistently sized particles when ground, yielding more flavor from less coffee, according to a study published in Scientific Reports.

In busy cafes, temperature matters. As room temperatures vary and grinders heat up with use, the consistency of the resulting grind changes. That’s a problem, because water extracts flavor from smaller coffee grounds faster than bigger ones. An inconsistent grind means sour taste from the small grains, and a bitter one from the big, all at the same time. For a more flavor-driven, sour and sweet cup, baristas adjust grinder settings for finer particles throughout the day.

But Colonna and Smalls, a specialty coffee shop in Britain, used science instead. They got together with chemists at nearby University of Bath to see how temperature affected how coffee beans break. They started at room temperature and went down to that of liquid nitrogen (-321 degrees Fahrenheit). It turned out, the colder the bean, the more uniform particles it produced, and the more even the flavor.

Read more here.