An excerpt from Wired -
The Chemical Engineer Who’ll School You on Coffee
By CAIT OPPERMANN
AS A CHEMICAL engineer who studies the motion of fluids, Bill Ristenpart deals with a lot of spattered blood and aerosolized pathogenic mouse phlegm. But when it comes to teaching wary freshman the basics of mass transfer and thermodynamics, the UC Davis professor relies on a less messy (and more potable) liquid: coffee. Beans go through so many complex chemical changes that they can easily form the basis of a whole curriculum.
Ristenpart’s three year-old course, the Design of Coffee, has become the most popular chemical engineering class in the country, enrolling a quarter of Davis’ freshmen. After spending the semester deconstructing coffeemakers and determining pH levels by taste, the 500-odd students compete to engineer the tastiest brew using the least amount of energy. Which isn’t easy, Ristenpart says, because “we know very little about coffee.” Though Americans down some 400 million cups a day, US researchers don’t typically study it; there’s little incentive for agencies like the USDA to fund research on a crop grown thousands of miles away in the tropics. Nearly everything about java, from the microbial intricacies of fermentation to the molecular basis of flavor, remains a mystery.
https://www.wired.com/2017/02/study-coffee-at-uc-davis/?mbid=nl_2117_p2&CNDID=
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