What lies beneath
My favourite part of doing a roasting course was watching green coffee beans turn into a caramel, chocolate-brown colour through a little viewing window while their powerful aroma filled the room.
Over a couple of short minutes, thousands of chemical reactions take place together with irreversible physical changes that allow us to extract the aroma and flavour locked inside beans.
Let’s look deeper inside a bean to see exactly how this transformation happens on a microscopic level.
Microscopes normally use the power of light beams to magnify an object of interest. In the case of coffee, optical microscopes allow us to
