Okay. I take responsibility. I took us straight into the deep end last week. We dove right into molecules that look like this. That can be confusing AF for those of us who haven't taken a science class since high school. 

I might have been a bit overzealous. But I swear it was with good intentions. 

You see, I LOVE science and I feel it gets a bad rap. People think it's reserved only for the nerds, the PhDs, and the liberals. When really, ALL people need science and can learn a lot from it. I want the science section of this blog to be one where we all feel comfortable looking at data. I want us to look, understand, and not be intimidated by the data. Being able to look at data and not be intimidated is a great skill. It's a real skill that we can use every single day - sourcing foods, whether or not to trust online articles, and analyzing the latest documentary you watched on netflix. We should make decisions based on the weight of the evidence. 

So, on this blog, I want to be grounded in data. I don't want there to be conjecture or philosophizing. I don't want things to be dumbed down. I don't want to "interpret" anything. I want for all of us to look at a study, look at the crazy graphs, and be like "ya, I understand that." Because we can. We can in coffee. We can in health. We can in climate change. We are capable. We can look at the data for ourselves and find answers. The only places we can't are in subjects like biophysics and complicated materials sciences. . . but we have friends for that. Or at least Christine and I do. If you need some of those friends, we can share them with you. They're real nice. (Jose Luis Olmos Jr.,  Adrianne Spencer, and David Spencer).  #scienceforeveryone #dataisreal #scienceisreal 

With my small rant being out of the way, let's take a step back and actually build a foundation so that we can all think about coffee a little bit differently and a little more sciencey. Here's the plan for the next four weeks. 
​
Week 1 - Introduce General Hardness (this one) 
Week 2 - Introduce Alkalinity
Week 3 - Put It All Together
Week 4 - Collect Our Own Data

I want to just put a little bit of data in front of you. 

Let's just let that marinate for a few seconds.

(Pause for marinating). 
​
You might be thinking, "what the heck even is this?" 

This is a graph of how the relationship between water alkalinity and total hardness impacts the quality of a brewed cup of coffee. In other words, this is a graph describing the important relationship between extraction capacity and buffering capacity. In other, other words, this graph explains how to make good coffee based on lots of data. By the end of the four weeks we will be able to understand this graph and how it can help us. Keep this in the back of your mind. 

An ion is a charged particle. Table salt is composed of sodium and chloride (NaCl). When you salt your water before making your pasta, the NaCl is dissolved into water and it splits into Na+ and Cl- molecules. Na+ and Cl- are ions. They are positively and negatively charged, respectively. If you were to take a super duty microscope and zoom in on the water in your pot, it would look something like this, with the charged ions being surrounded by the water. 

There are many different ions present in water. The few that we care about for today are magnesium (Mg2+), calcium (Ca2+), and forms of carbonate (H2CO3, HCO3-, CO32-). 

If you remember back to our last blog, magnesium and calcium are the ions responsible for extracting a lot of the good stuff out of the coffee bean. They are important for making coffee tasty. When we refer to total hardness, we refer to calcium and magnesium, as you can see on this handy chart below. The amount of dissolved calcium and magnesium make up the total hardness. 

So, let's go back to the graph that we showed earlier. 

Plotted on the y-axis (vertical axis) is total hardness (think magnesium and calcium). We can think of total hardness as the extraction capacity of the water. The higher the total hardness, the more the water can pull from the coffee bean. In the top left corner of the image the tasting notes are overextracted, heavy, dull, and sour. The key there is overextracted. That's why I bolded it. Christine probably would have even made it a different color altogether. So I'm going to do that too. OVEREXTRACTED. At those higher ranges of total hardness, the water is pulling TOO MUCH from the coffee beans. It's even pulling the molecules that do not taste good. When you taste coffee that has been overextracted, it has a linger on your tongue. It has a heavy mouth feel to it because of the high number of dissolved solutes the total hardness pulled. 

You will also notice another tasting note in the top right hand corner - sour. That comes from the acids. The high total hardness pulled all of the acids into the cup of coffee, leading to a very acidic cup. Think sour patch kids in coffee form. It's not great. There was no buffer to help balance out the acidity. This is where the alkalinity comes in. We will get into that next week.

My wife found a good metaphor for total hardness.

Christine's Interpretation: Pie is fantastic. Delicious pie is just unmatched. I mean, who doesn't want to eat pie? I can't name anyone. Seriously. Not a single human. My grandma makes a mean rhubarb pie. You would think, because pie is so damn good, you could eat a crap ton of pie (any flavor - pick your favorite) and never get tired of it.  But we all know that's not true. There's a point, maybe it's your third, maybe fourth, or maybe your fifth slice when you no longer want to take another bite. It's just too heavy. You start to pick up on weird flavors in the filling. The perfection of the crust no longer seems ideal. All you want is a piece of kale and a nice nap. That's when you know you've past your ideal total pie level. In the same way, we want magnesium and calcium, but at some point, you get too much of a good thing, and it turns bad. That's when you've past your ideal Total Hardness Level. 

We are building a foundation, so let's talk about the key takeaways from this first foundation level. 

Total hardness refers to the amount of magnesium and calcium in water, which we can think of as the water's extraction capacity.

Total hardness = extraction capacity. 

Too much of a good thing, can be a bad thing. 

And, perhaps most importantly, 

If you don't like pie, then something may be wrong with you. 

Hendon uses software to model the environment of brewing coffee at a molecular molecular level. (Hendon goes into his methods in the paper, and he goes into the basic science behind those methods in his book Water for Coffee. If you're interested I'd suggest reading him for more information). Using this model, Hendon determines the strength of the interaction between each ion, the seven chosen coffee compounds, and water. You can think of the interaction as the pull. The stronger the interaction, the stronger the pull. With this information Hendon can discuss the extraction capacity of each ion. The stronger an ion interacts with a coffee compound, the more likely it is to pull the compound into the cup of coffee. . . the higher the extraction. 

Christine's interpretation: Imagine you have three female roommates and you want to set them up with one of your seven guy friends. You'd put each roommate together with each guy and see how they interact. The stronger a roommate interacts with one of the guy friends, the more likely the relationship would actually work and produce something good. So homeboy Hendon just set up three ions on a date with seven compounds to see which compounds would work together strongly enough to extract into the coffee. 

Hendon displays his data in two ways - interaction lengths between ion and coffee compound and the relative binding energy between ion and coffee compound.

Christine's Interpretation: You decide to chart your friends dates because it's getting complicated to keep all your info in multiple group texts. You notice that the shorter the date was, the better it went because they knew so quickly they liked each other they didn't even need to continue the first date (not real life, trying to make the metaphor work here people). So you chart the interaction length between friend and roommate. You also chart their "binding energy" with one another. . . I'll let you fill in the blanks on what that might mean.

These results are shown below. (I took these data straight from Hendon et al., 2014 so mad credit and thanks).

The simplest and most straightforward way to think about these data is that the shorter the interaction length, the stronger the pull. Similarly, the stronger the relative binding energy, the stronger the pull. When looking at table 1 and figure 3, the data are consistent. You can see that magnesium has both the shorter interaction length and the stronger relative binding energy across all coffee compounds. Magnesium has the best pull. This suggests that if we want to improve extraction then our water should have a higher proportion of magnesium. We've seen the data. We know that magnesium is going to improve our extraction Let's talk about how we can actually apply this data to making a better cup of coffee.

Christine's interpretation: You realize your roommate Magnesium connected super well with all seven guy friends and now they all want to date her. 

There's a few things we can take from Hendon et al. (2014), some of which couldn't be implied with the data shown in the paper.

1) Magnesium is favorable for extraction. 

• Hendon notes that not only does magnesium seem to have a stronger pull with the coffee compounds, but it also seems to have a selectively favorable pull with the right compounds. Quinic acid and chlorogenic acid have been known to bring some yucky tastes to a cup of coffee.  Magnesium has a higher binding energy to lactic acid, malic acid, and citric acid relative to quinic acid and chlorogenic acid when compared to calcium (if only by approximately 5%). So magnesium relatively extracts more of the good stuff. I think that there is room for argument with Hendon's logic here, but we will wait to make those arguments until I have aged past baby barista and baby scientist. Note to file for later.

2) If you want caffeinated coffee, don't use sodium rich water (btw Kansas City tap water tends to be sodium rich. Here's a link to the 2017 KC water report)

• Hendon remarks that sodium is about as good at water at pulling the acidic coffee compounds and actually is worse than water at pulling caffeine and eugenol. Sodium will not improve extraction relative to plain water. If you want a flavorful cup of coffee Hendon wouldn't suggest using sodium rich water. This is important to take into consideration if you use a sodium-exchange filter system (some filter cartridges will exchange sodium for calcium) or if you are like us and you live in Kansas City. 

3) This paper only tells us that magnesium is better for extracting compared to calcium and sodium. It doesn't specifically tell us how much magnesium is good, nor does it get into the other variables that affect the final cup of coffee like buffers and total hardness. We will get into these later, but for now we know that....

RESEARCH SHOWS MAGNESIUM IS GOOD FOR SPRO. 

Happy Brewing, 
​Jon Clutton
Coffee Scientist/Barista

I had intended to write this week's blog about baskets. The espresso kind of basket. The silver one that holds coffee grounds and sits in an espresso machine. Because, let's be honest .... they are riveting. But, during the time that I had set aside to write what would have probably been (okay, let's be honest) a pretty boring blog about baskets, I found myself driving to Cadiz, Kentucky in a rescue mission of sorts. 

At 4:54 PM Tuesday evening I received a call from my incredible wife. By 6:05 PM I was on the road in a white pickup truck, owned by her father, that, luckily, is as reliable as her father. Christine's car had broken down in the hills of Tennessee trying to tow our new coffee trailer. Which, by the way, has been affectionately named Stella and is often referred to by my wife as "our baby". So I took off to St. Louis to stay the night with friends, and then finished the rest of the seven hour drive to our rescue point, Cadiz, Kentucky.

In lieu of this adventure, this week's blog will not be about baskets, but instead it will be a short photo story of all our adventures in the past two weeks. There have been some momentous milestones. 

We pulled our first shot. 

Had our first customer. 

Christine's friend and former co-worker, Deidre, drove 12 hours here and back from Austin to help with out first pop-up shop. 

Christine's friend, Adri Guyer, took incredible photos of our pop-up, making us look professional AF. 

Christine's Dad drove 1000 miles, braved the Tennessee hills, and kept the trailer and Christine safe and sound.

We met Jerry, who is a master at making custom trailers from the ground up and, who we found out, does not like taking photos. Luckily, Christine has a way of wooing people into things.

And . . . we made it home safely (with our baby). 

We are two weeks in, and I have learned that our friends are more reliable than our car. That Nashville is a great weekend trip destination from Kansas City. And that 15 year old cars pry aren't the safest bet when traveling with a 1200 lb trailer attached to it.

​Thank you to everyone who is making this dream come true. It's way more possible with you, and it's way more fun too. 

Here's my favorite picture of Christine. Enjoy the pure joy radiating from her. 

Best,

​Jon Clutton

​Photo Cred: Prima Coffee 

Photo Cred: homegrounds.co

By: Jon Clutton 
​
Never did I think I’d be writing a blog about coffee. Three years ago I didn’t even like coffee. And I still don’t really like blogs. I thought coffee was just that stuff served in towering silver cylinders at church. I think blogs can be too agenda-pushing. Too sale-sy. Too fake. Yet here I am, drinking coffee and writing a blog.

What. On. Earth. Happened.

What could have prompted me to drink coffee and write a blog about it? As most things go… it was a girl. A girl I have a crush on. This girl to be exact. ​

​Sustainability and ethics. Coffee is a global business with challenges facing it, many of which we deal with every day. Global warming, fair wages, sustainable farming practices, and creating a work environment people actually like showing up to. 

Coffee sums up some of the things that are pretty dear to me and that I’d like to spend more time researching, thinking through, and discussing with a community of people. This is what led me to the blog. 

So every week we will be posting a blog pertaining to one of these three discussions: 

Coffee Science: experimentation and innovation to create bomb drinks
Friendships: aspiring to be good humans to each other in all aspects of the coffee industry
Sustainability: discussing how to do mother earth a solid and giving all humans fair wages

Given Christine’s background in both ethical business and in coffee shop management, she will primarily be blogging about the friendship & sustainability topics. Whereas, I will lean into the science topics. Our hope is this blog will be a place to explore these areas with an inclusive online community with whom we can dialog, discuss, and act together. 

------------------------------
SCIENCE DISCLAIMER

In case you are like my wife, who self admittedly tunes out 40% of what I am saying when I start speaking “science”, this disclaimer is for you. 

Coffee is pretty straightforward. It’s just beans and water. And we plan to keep it that simple. Christine proof reads all my blogs (and I, hers) in order to make sure everyone can understand, AND enjoy them. There is this great Einstein quote my organic chemistry professor use to say, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” 

This is our hope for the science topic on the blog. We want to make coffee as simple as possible, but no simpler. We want to dive into the science of coffee without sounding like 80-year-old-tenured-professors. Science is sometimes an unapproachable topic for baristas and home brewers, but our intent is to make it as simple as possible, without doing the injustice of dumbing it down.

When it comes to amazing science-based coffee communities, there are already many people who do this well: baristahustle.com
jimseven.com
strivefortone.com
sprudge.com
r/coffee
socraticcoffee.com
and KC's very own kccoffeegeek.com.

​We hope that we can bring this level of passion and inclusivity too.

By day, I work in Alzheimer’s research at KU Med. Recently, there has been a lot of innovation in the field. Scientists have been able to look at the data in new ways. There is a lot of evidence hinting that Alzheimer’s is a metabolic issue (i.e. our ability to use and store energy). This is a novel idea because for 30 years they thought it was caused by proteins called Amyloid and Tau. This fresh look at age-old diseases isn’t just confined to Alzheimer’s. It’s endemic in the science community, especially among ordinary people sifting through the literature in new ways completely on their own. From sugar, to fats, to cancer, autoimmune issues, and cardiovascular health. There is a revival in the evidence-based approach to science. My hope is that we can do something similar in coffee.

This is what I hope to do with the science aspect to this blog. Provide evidence-based research behind coffee and let YOU ALL, be my peer-reviewers.

Christine and I look forward to writing about topics that puzzle, excite, and challenge us and to hear your responses. 

Best,
Jon Clutton