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.
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In the beverage world, there are few names bigger than Starbucks and Anheuser-Busch. The two dominate any discussion of coffee or beer respectively, but they’re now partnering up to help capture the market of a third beverage – tea. Specifically, Starbucks is looking to begin selling their Teavana line of teas as ready-to-drink specialty bottles in grocery stores around the world. They decided to partner with Anheuser Busch to handle the bottling aspect of the operation, and if spokespeople for both companies are to be believed, there is plenty of revenue to go around.
According to Todd Carmichael, founder of coffee chain and industry leader 
Stressing the “humility and respect” with which they are undertaking this endeavor, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announced recently that in early 2017, Starbucks will finally open their first store in Italy. It may be surprising that such a store doesn’t exist already, especially since the Starbucks brand was born out of Schultz’s first trip to Milan 33 years ago, but the company is understandably cautious about bringing one of the largest chains in the world to a culture that prizes small-scale coffee operations and exquisite attention to detail.
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