Everything you've ever wanted to know about coffee | Chandler Graf | TEDxACU

[Music] throughout my time working in coffee I've had many conversations with people from all walks of life some old some young some students some professionals and one thing I've learned from all this is that there's something very extraordinary about this simple beverage you and I drink almost every morning coffee about a billion people all over the world drink coffee every day meaning that your morning shares something in its routine with someone in Ethiopia someone in Indonesia Guatemala Honduras Etc the list goes on and on people come to coffee for all sorts of different reasons but

rarely because they loved it the first time they tried it right I mean who tries coffee for the first time and just loves it just black by itself most people love the cream and sugar that you add to it some people like coffee because of the the vibe of coffee shops they love going to study or work on something or some people love coffee because of the amazing conversations they've been able to have over a good cup of coffee I remember being at my grandparents house when I was 6 7 8 years old and walking

downstairs before anybody was awake and see my grandpa with his same old mug drinking black coffee and reading the newspaper and admiring him and wanting to be like him one day the truth is is that people come to coffee for a variety of reasons but along the way I think we've made a mistake there I think that we've put too much importance on all these communal aspects which are awesome but we've kind of put the actual coffee brewing on the back burner coffee is seen as something mundane we do the same thing every week coffee

is anything but mundane to illustrate this I want us to work through a problem together a problem that many of us face almost weekly and that is buying coffee at the grocery store now maybe you have a local coffee shop that you can go to and you can ask the Barista or the person working what coffee might suit your taste or what you might like or not like but what if you're like most people and you just go to the grocery store and have to buy coffee you turn down the aisle and are faced with

about 300 options with all these words on them and you have no idea what they mean should you get the light Roose should you get the dark roast why do these have countries on them who knows should I buy the Starbucks brand should I buy the cheap brand well we end up doing instead is buying a very mediocre coffee not knowing what it's going to taste like not knowing if we're going to like it and just recreating that habit day in and day out I believe that with a little bit of knowledge about how coffee

is made how it is produced and where we get it from we can make a much better decision on a weekly basis so let's start with what coffee actually is many people are very surprised that coffee is actually made from a cherry okay so coffee does not grow on the plant in Bean form in fact if I had to make an analogy coffee beans are really like the pit of a cherry that you and I eat all the time they're kind of tart you wouldn't want to eat them but you could we don't see this

in the US because coffee is not grown in the US but all over the world farmers who grow these crops are faced with the difficulties of extracting the beans out of these cherries well how they do that and the differences in the process processing methods in which they do that make a huge impact on how the coffee tastes in the end so there are two primary methods the first one is the most prominent way and that is called washed farmers will take the cherries they'll put them on these beds and they'll actually wash them with

water removing the pulp removing the fruit and removing the skin of these cherries then they allow these coffee beans to lay out in the fields and dry for about 30 to 40 days now we are isolating the coffee bean in this technique therefore the taste in the cup is unhindered by anything else it's just the Coffee Bean just the pit of the Cherry is influencing The Taste now the other prominent method is called natural and it's just like it sounds it has very little human involvement if you were to take let's say an apple or

just a cherry and put it out in the sun for about 10 20 days what would happen well it would start to ferment it would start to Decay we would say that would look disgusting and it would not be edible anymore but this is a process that farmers take advantage of there are bacteria that live on the Cherry that when allowed to ferment out in the sun for 10 20 30 days actually metabolize the sugars in the Cherry and produce byproducts that influence the taste of The Bean so after 30 days they're drying the farmers

will then remove the fruit remove the pulp the skin and what they're left with is a bean that is still very characteristic of the taste that a washed method might have but is also influenced by some of this fermentation process there's some sweetness that rounds out the bitterness there's kind of a creaminess to it so if you're looking for maybe a sweeter less intense cup of coffee definitely recommend natural process to you now we have how we've gotten the beans out of the Cherry but what about where they come from this is huge you walk

into the store and you see things like Java or somatra coffee shops really love to put that on bags or maybe you see Guatemala or South America or Africa well even though it's the same coffee plant grown in all these different regions it actually makes a huge difference where they're grown and how that influences the cup let's take two Origins and and juxtapose them let's take a look at Indonesia and Ethiopia Indonesia is a mountainous country as well as Ethiopia but in Indonesia most coffees are grown at very low altitudes Starbucks for example Starbucks grows

almost all of their coffee at low altitude farms in Indonesia ju suppose that to Ethiopia which is also mountainous but in Ethiopia most of the coffees are grown at very high altitudes so what's the difference at low altitudes we have lots of oxygen we have lots of carbon dioxide right the gas is more dense there we know this this because when we've gone hiking it's easy to start out at the beginning right there's lots of air but as you get higher up the mountain the air starts to become less dense less oxygen it's harder to

breathe now these coffees grown at low altitudes have high turnover rates and this is why it makes sense for Starbucks to be down there lipin makes their tea down there folders makes coffee down there they have high demands and thus have to make lots of coffee beans it's fine I love coffee from Indonesia it makes a very traditional cup now if you look at Ethiopia these beans are grown high in the mountains most times without oxygen coffee plants cannot undergo normal respiration respiration is just another term for making energy when we try to make energy

without oxygen it's called Anor robic respiration this is what happens when we lift weights our bodies don't have enough oxygen and thus have to make energy a different route and they do this by making lactate lactate is then broken down into what we know as lactic acid and you probably heard that lactic acid is what makes your muscle sore so coffee plants do the same thing instead of lifting weights though they're trying to grow coffee beans they're trying to grow coffee cherries so in this case they don't have enough oxygen they don't have enough CO2

and so they have to make their energy via anerobic respiration without oxygen this produces lactate which is broken down to lactic acid now lactic acid might not sound like a desirable trait in coffee but it actually imparts wonderful flavors to your coffee lactic acid is known for imparting that same creaminess that we talked about in natural coffees imparts um kind of a fruit likee acidity maybe a brightness to the cup but it also kind of balances out that bitterness that you might find in your traditional coffees so if we take a step back and look

now we know if we're really looking for a fruity cup of coffee something that's sweet not as strong kind of light in your mouth then we're going to go back and we're going to say well I want a natural process right because we know that there's some natural flavors from the fermentation process there and then we also are going to look and we say well I could choose a coffee from Indonesia but if I'm looking for something with a little sweetness to it maybe something from higher elevation Ethiopia Kenya some of those African countries are

usually grown at very high elevations now we know kind of where we've gotten our coffee from but what about the roast we see this all the time this might be the one we're most familiar with light roast or dark roast or you might see City Roast sometime or City Plus well all of this is just a scale of really really light coffee beans to really really dark almost black coffee beans and the difference here is just how long they were allowed to be in the oven essentially roasting coffee just means cooking coffee and we do

this for one really important reason a chemical reaction that you and I are very familiar with even if you didn't know it and this is called the malard reaction the malard reaction takes sugars from carbohydrates your glucose or sucrose lactose and under high heat combines them with amino acids which are what your muscles are made out of coffee beans have amino acids and sugars as well when this combination occurs under high heat we we can see a difference and we can also taste a difference and we know if you eat red meat this is the

exact same reason why you sear your steak before you grill it you get kind of that that brown almost burnt texture to it you can taste it you can see it well these are very desirable flavors it's a good type of burn well the same thing happens with coffee and the flavors that are produced from this reaction are very desirable we like these they're caramelized they're chocolaty they're almost bitter without being overwhelming these are very Savory flavors when you're looking at Coffee dark roasted coffee has allowed the malard reaction to go on for longer therefore

having more of those Savory notes now dark roasted coffees are great but we need to understand there's a trade-off here because to make those dark roasted flavors that we all love we've actually taken away from the original Taste of The Bean see those beans we had to use the sugars from the beans we had to use the amino acids from the beans and use those to make those Savory compounds that we like so if you're looking for a maybe a really fancy coffee and you want to taste it for how that bean actually tastes maybe

stick to the lighter roast because you have more of that bean to taste now what about caffeine we love caffeine right it might be the world's favorite chemical well caffeine is great but caffeine at its most simplest form is actually an impostor it's actually lying to your body so every time you drink a cup of coffee you're actually lying to your body caffeine works by tricking your body to think it is a molecule called adenosine now adenosine is really useful to our bodies we use it for a number of chemical reactions but one of them

is when we're trying to go to sleep when the Sun starts to go down our body sets off a set of chemical reactions that make us sleepy one of those being releasing adenosine adenosine will then go into the brain and bind to its respective receptor this triggers a set of chemical reactions that will decrease epinephrine in the body that will decrease adrenaline right so we're inhibiting all these excitatory molecules that keep us awake well caffeine is really tricky caffeine is chemically similar enough to a denzine to bind to that receptor but but chemically different enough

that when it does bind it doesn't have the same Downstream effects so instead of inhibiting adrenaline instead of inhibiting epinephrine it allows the body to keep on making those as if adenosine was never released so it is true that coffee cannot give you energy that is true but the way Coffee Works the reason why it makes us feel awake is because it can stop us from getting tired now we have a pretty good grasp on what coffee we're buying right we can walk into the store and we can say okay I want a really sweet

cup of coffee I'm going to go with a natural and I'm going to get um maybe one from Ethiopia and I'm going to do a medium roast cuz I don't want too much of the Savory stuff but I also don't want it too acidic so that's a really good balanced cup maybe I want a dark cup of coffee maybe I'll go a washed from Indonesia maybe I'll have a darker roast that'd be a great option but we haven't brewed the coffee yet right we have to get it in the cup somehow so today I want

to look at two primary Brewing methods two that kind of represent Polar Opposites on the Spectrum first being a French press now the French press works by a brewing method what we call Total immersion now we do this by allowing the coffee and the water to sit with each other for a long amount of time around 5 minutes and what this does is it allows everything that's soluble in the coffee to move over to the water so what we end up with is a very oily cup of coffee it gives a great textured coffee a

good body to the coffee that's what we call kind of thicker coffee a well bodied coffee now on the other end of the spectrum we have what is called aimex or for our purposes pourover coffee now pourover coffee is completely different from Total immersion pourover coffee means that the second the water hits the ground coffee it is on a straight shot for the glass or for in this case the kff only the most readily available components in the coffee are going to be dissolved into the water the difference here is that in the French Press

we're allowing the coffee in the water to mingle for about 5 minutes which is pretty long time and the kimex though as you can see as soon as the water hits the grounds it starts going down into the water so we are only allowing the coffee and the water to sit with each other for a couple seconds what this does is it only allows the most readily soluble parts of the coffee to transfer to the water so what we lose in this method from The French Press is that full bod that thickness that great texture

but what we gain is some clarity if you're looking for a cup of coffee that's going to highlight more of the complex ities maybe see more of the flavors maybe see how the coffee changes when it cools down a kimx is going to show those things off better now these are just two different Brewing methods that are able to Accent different characteristics of the coffee we can isolate different variables different textures different flavors and we have so many ways to do this the options are unlimited so now you walk into a coffee shop and you're

greeted by a huge menu full of tons of items and all in words that are not English and you don't know what to order well the truth is is coffee shops have over complicated their menu the backbone of coffee shop drinks is just espresso and steamed milk that's it now we've added flavors in we've changed the sizes up but all you have is espresso and steam milk so let's look at these three drinks as an example here you have the smallest drink also the strongest the cortado secondly we have kind of a middle of a

road drink the cappuccino which is a third espresso third steam milk and a third foam over here you have the largest drink and the least intense drink the latte which just 2 to 4 o of espresso and the rest steam milk I hope you can use what youve learned here today to go out into your local coffee shop or your local grocery store to buy and make better coffee [Music]