Why does salty taste appear in coffee? What is the reason why the brewed coffee is salty? What does under-extracted coffee do?

Sour, sweet and bitter are the three most common flavors we drink in a cup of coffee. As these three flavors are very important to the composition of a cup of coffee, the theme of the article often revolves around the three flavors. However, in addition to these three flavors, there is actually another flavor in the coffee, that is, salty.

There has always been a salty taste in coffee, which mainly comes from the minerals contained in coffee beans, such as cyanide, bromide, iodide, nitrate, sodium, magnesium, calcium, and other inorganic substances. Just because its proportion is not high, it is often concealed by other smells so that people can not detect it. Therefore, compared with the first three, the existence of salty taste is more like a silent logistics role, because its existence is conducive to the improvement of coffee quality! In "adding salt to coffee makes it sweeter? Qianjie shared in this article that because the taste belongs to the relationship of mutual checks and balances, adding the right amount of salt to the coffee can increase the sweetness and bitterness and increase the thickness of the alcohol, and the salty contained in the coffee itself has the same function. But there is a premise, that is, the existence of salty taste is moderate and unnoticed.

The reason why people do not deliberately emphasize the existence of salty taste is that as long as there is no problem with extraction and beans, then salty taste, as mentioned above, is difficult for people to detect. If we drink obviously salty taste from a cup of coffee, there is a good chance that there is something wrong with the quality of the cup of coffee. The cause of the problem may be either the extraction and cooking or the beans themselves. So today, Qianjie will come to share what causes the obvious salty taste in the coffee.

First, the impact of the planting environment of coffee beans is well known. When coffee is planted at a higher altitude, coffee will slow down its growth rate because of low temperatures, and the body will produce more substances to resist the cold, including sugar, which also contributes to the formation of high-quality flavor. When coffee is grown at low elevations, the growth rate of coffee tends to be conventional, and it does not deliberately produce organic acids and sugars to resist extreme environments, so naturally, there will not be too sour and sweet taste to mask the salty taste.

In addition to altitude, the use of fertilizer, the time of light, the amount of rainfall and other effects of the planting period will affect the accumulation of coffee substances, when the fewer substances that can form sour and sweet, the more salty coffee will be. When we are brewing this kind of coffee beans, the easier it is to bring out the salty taste.

Second, the impact of defective beans before and after baking, if the baker does not screen the defective beans, then because of the existence of defective beans, the brewed coffee may produce obvious salty taste. Among all the defective beans, the coffee that is easy to produce salty taste is "unripe beans", also known as "white beans".

Baimu beans are coffee beans that are harvested and processed before the coffee fruit is ripe. The organic acids in coffee are not converted into sugar because they are harvested before maturity. Sugar is an important ingredient to produce rich aroma and flavor in the process of baking. Therefore, the unripe beans that have not been converted can not produce rich aroma and flavor after baking, but are more grass-smelling, acerbity and astringency.

When a certain amount of white beans are mixed with other normal cooked beans, these beans will drag down the taste of the whole cup of coffee, making the coffee more likely to be obviously salty. Therefore, before and after baking, bakers must strictly screen defective beans, and Baimu is only one of them.

Third, the impact of extraction, which is the most frequent link leading to the salty taste of coffee-extraction. When making coffee, if the coffee extraction is insufficient / the concentration is too high due to improper parameters or brewing, then there is a good chance that we will be able to drink salty taste from the coffee. Because the sweet and bitter substances have not been fully dissolved, the amount of sweet, sour and bitter taste in the coffee is not enough to cover up the existence of the salty taste, so when the extraction is insufficient, the salty taste will be easily detected and felt by people.

The high concentration is because the taste is so concentrated that our taste buds are unable to subdivide the taste and simply package it and transmit it to the brain. At this time, the salty we feel is the illusion that the taste is too concentrated.

So how can you tell which situation causes the salty taste? It is very simple, as long as we can tell by diluting the coffee liquid with extra water. If the salty taste disappears after adding water, it means that it is an illusion caused by too high concentration; and if the salty taste still exists after diluting it, it is due to insufficient extraction, and we need to adjust the extraction parameters to improve the extraction efficiency. (of course, it is not ruled out that the concentration is too high at the same time of insufficient extraction.) generally, the cases of salty taste caused by insufficient extraction are the most, and most of them are concentrated on high-density, light-roasted coffee beans and uncultivated coffee beans. Because these beans are relatively difficult to extract, coffee is more likely to underextract and then taste salty.

So high-density, light-roasted coffee brewing we can move to this article to learn "how to brew light-roasted coffee beans?" For coffee beans that are too fresh, Qianjie suggests that they should be brewed for a few days until the content of carbon dioxide does not affect the extraction too much.

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