will remember our work to understand the science of freshness – finding out when coffee tastes good, and not so good.

Well, our in-house sensory analyst Dr Eduarda Cristovam has been hard at work discovering the chemistry behind freshness. She looked at everything from unbrewed grounds, to coffee prepared from beans thirty days after roasting.

Using a (wait for it) solid phase microextraction fibre – a thin, hollow needle to you and me - air was collected from around the various coffees and analysed using gas chromatography. The result? We’re starting to understand which molecules are related to freshness and staleness – the scientific name is ‘aroma volatiles’.

The next step is to test fresh and stale coffees with a panel of real customers. As Eduarda points out, UK consumers are used to supermarket coffee. And most UK supermarket coffee is stale, so the results could be interesting.

Eventually, Eduarda hopes people will shun stale coffee the same way they would a mouldy loaf of bread. Puts it in perspective, doesn’t it?

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