Coffee lovers, rejoice! You can make your beverage more flavoursome simply by by chilling the beans before grinding, a new study has found.
This results in narrower distribution of small particles, which during the brewing process allows access to more flavour from the same amount of coffee, according to researchers from University of Bath in the UK.
They studied the effect of grinding beans at different temperatures, from room temperature to -196 degrees Celsius, and found that the colder the beans, the finer and more uniform the particles were from the grind.
This is important because small uniform coffee grinds allow for better extraction of the flavour compounds- allowing you to brew more coffee and get more flavour, researchers said.
"What you are looking for is a grind that has the smallest difference between the smallest and largest particle. If you have small grinds you can push flavour extraction upwards," said Christopher Hendon, previously from University of Bath and currently with Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US.
"We found that chilling the beans tightens up this process and can give higher extractions with less variance in the flavour - so you would have to brew it for less time, or could get more coffee from the same beans," said Hendon.
"It will alter the taste, because subtle changes in particle size distributions make a huge difference in rate of extraction," he added.
The findings were published in the journal Scientific Reports.
