SIZE matters (PART V: SIGNAL AND NOISE)

At this point in our series, we’d like to introduce a framework we think is very useful when it comes to brewing and tasting coffee. You might have heard the term “signal-to-noise ratio” (often abbreviated to SNR). With a SNR framework, the world can be thought of as containing stimuli we are interested in (signals) mixed with stimuli we are not interested in (noise). SNR is the ratio of signal power to noise power.

In our last column (December 2016), we mentioned a concept of optimal extraction, where the ratio of extracted compounds from a coffee particle