This application note presents a novel study of coffee aroma profiling by analyzing volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted at a series of progressively higher temperatures.
Coffee has surpassed Tea in popularity during the past decade and become the most popular non alcoholic beverage in the world. The earliest credible evidence of coffee drinking could be traced back to the late 15th century in Ethiopia. Throughout the spread of coffee drinking in the last 5 hundred years, varieties of commercial coffee products emerged on the market. The preference of a specific coffee product by the consumer is determined by the aroma and taste, where the former factor could be categorized as flowery, nutty, smoky and herby, while the latter factor includes acidity, bitterness, sweetness, saltiness and sourness.
Previous study1 has correlated 28 volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from coffee to the first determining factor - aroma. The traditional method2 to map the aroma profiling is using the headspace sampling technique to count the integrated peak areas for the target 28 VOCs at a fixed temperature. The drawbacks of this method are (1) due to the complex matrices in coffee, target VOCs may possess low concentration and overlap with many high concentration compounds without sufficient separation; (2) the aroma profile built at a single temperature point may not dynamically represent the principal components shift along with the coffee temperature change, since the kinetic of thermal extraction on a specific VOC varies by temperature. In this application note, a novel aroma profiling analysis is performed by studying volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted from a coffee sample at progressively higher temperatures instead of a fixed temperature.
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