Coffee lovers, listen up!

You might think that you have very little in common with professional physicists – even the space-loving among you.

But one thing that you likely share with physicists is your love of – let’s face it, reliance on – coffee. The world’s smartest minds need caffeinating too!

And thanks to the threat posed to the growth of coffee beans by climate change, a team of physicists from the University of Pennsylvania have turned their hands (and minds) to perfecting the pour, in both a taste- and efficiency-sense.

The world’s rising temperatures are threatening the cultivation of coffee, thanks to their very specific requirements. Add to that the increasing proliferation of pests – who love warm, damp weather and love the taste of coffee plants too – and you’ll start to understand why coffee is being produced in lesser quantity and quality.

This is a problem, since it is estimated that 2.25 billion cups of coffee are consumed around the world every day.

And if you’ve ever tried to get between a coffee-lover and their beverage of choice, you’ll know how dangerous the situation could come to be.

With this in mind, the researchers aimed to optimize the use of coffee grounds, to ensure that they are being used in the most efficient way possible, in order to protect our stocks of coffee into the future.

Their findings, which have been recently published in the journal Physics of Fluids, finds an optimal way to make the coffee, prioritizing both taste of the beverage and the efficient use of the grounds.

Their suggested technique, which they explain a statement, allows the coffee grounds to mix better with the water, allowing fewer beans to be used to brew the perfect pot of coffee. It’s all in the motion, as co-author Ernest Park explains:

“What we recommend is making the pour height as high as possible, while still maintaining a laminar flow, where the jet doesn’t break up when it impacts the coffee grinds.”

This particular technique, the authors conclude, creates a delicious and efficient beverage with relatively low cost and effort.

How? Well the movement of the coffee grounds as a focused and uninterrupted jet of water hits creates the perfect circulation, meaning that the best is achieved from a smaller number of beans. But this requires a thicker jet of water, as co-author Margot Young continues:

“If you have a thin jet, then it tends to break up into droplets.That’s what you want to avoid in these pour-overs, because that means the jet cannot mix the coffee grounds effectively.”

To reach their conclusions, the authors experimented not only with real coffee but with laser-illuminated particles in the lab, which recreated the behavior of the coffee grounds.

And it was this pour style that best encompassed all of the grounds, through the particular movement characteristics of both the water and the coffee.

It might seem trivial, but as our world continues to suffer the ongoing effects of the climate crisis, research like this could change a small but impactful part of your life.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about a second giant hole has opened up on the sun’s surface. Here’s what it means.