I was in lab late on Wednesday night, and along with my Hawaiian Chicken sandwich and Nutty Bars from Vital Vittles, I picked up a can of Iced Regular Coffee, made by Caribou Coffee. I wanted to link to the product page, but I couldn't find it on their site.



Note that the can says, a splash of milk. Milk drink with a splash of coffee would be a more accurate description. I don't drink my coffee black or anything, I do use milk, but still this was too much.

The milk wasn't the only problem, the coffee itself sucked. Let's take a look at the ingredients:

Coffee: Vague, but okay.
Reduced Fat Milk: I prefer whole milk or half and half myself, but this works.
Sugar: Glad to hear they used real sugar.
Sodium Bicarbonate: Hmm. I found a few patents involving coffee and sodium bicarbonate, but this one says: "It has been common in the past to add sodium bicarbonate to milk-added coffee beverages in order to prevent milk coagulation. Sodium bicarbonate is used because it is colorless and odorless, and has little effect on flavor." Okay, good enough for me.
Natural Flavors: I hate this, this does not count as an ingredient unless you tell me what it is.
Carrageenan: Perfectly normal sounding What the hell is this? Let's go into this some more.

Wikipedia tells us: "Carrageenans or carrageenins are a family of linear sulphated polysaccharides extracted from red seaweeds." Continuing on, "Carrageenan has also been used to thicken skim milk, in an attempt to emulate the consistency of whole milk. This usage did not become popular. It's used in some brands of soy milk." Ah ha!

Wait, Wikipedia also tells us (with no cited references, however) that it's also used as a sexual lubricant and microbicide, "Laboratory studies suggest that carrageenans might function as topical microbicides, blocking sexually transmitted viruses such as HPV and herpes, though not HIV."

And there's more, according to a 2006 study published in the American Journal of Physiology, "exposure of human intestinal epithelial cells to carrageenan triggers a distinct inflammatory pathway".

Summary:
Not only does the coffee have too much milk, and taste like crap, it might invoke an immunological response in my GI tract. Oh, but on the plus side, if I'm out of anti-STD lube, I can dip my junk into the coffee. Worst purchase ever.

Godspeed.
[Comments: 0] [Tags: coffee, food, ranting, science]

Lindinger's group at the Nestle Research Center in Switzerland published a study back in March 2008 in Analytical Chemistry about analyzing coffee with mass spec. I read about this on Engadget then promptly forgot about it. I even gave a presentation on it for my Analytical class, only later to see this in my RSS bookmarks.

Basically by using PTR-MS (proton transfer reaction mass spectrometry) they did an analysis of different coffees. They emphasized that this was a data-driven study, not a chemical analysis study, because they weren't necessarily analyzing the different compounds individually. Rather, what they were doing was taking the results of the mass spec, then combining them with the 'results' of a 10-member panel of coffee experts to create a model. So they just took the intensities of the different peaks (all the compounds that had 108 m/z, 110 m/z, etc.) and compared them to the 'intensities' of the panel ratings. A rough scheme is shown below.



The panelists rated the intensity of different qualities (coffee, bitter, cocoa, roasted, woody, cereal, butter toffee, acid, citrus, winey, and flowery) of the coffee. They ran a blind study, and the panel was able to produce reproducible results, so they apparently know what they're doing. I would imagine they look something like this:



Once the model was created, they did PTR-MS on another set of coffees, had the panel do their tests, then compare how well the model was able to predict it. You can see in the graph below that they were pretty successful. You can see that there are only 8 qualities below; they decided to scrap a few qualities, but didn't really explain why. The ones that they got rid of were: winey, flowery, cereal. You can assume that they took those out because they didn't fit with the model as well, and that's probably because those qualities are made up. Nobody drinks coffee and thinks, oh that was nice and flowery. But not winey enough. Nonsense.



I'd like to see them create a model that determines if coffee is good or bad. Sure, that's even more arbitrary, but it's more useful. Then we could take samples from a bunch of different coffee shops, and finally scientifically prove that Starbucks' coffee blows.



Lindinger, C., Labbe, D., Pollien, P., Rytz, A., Juillerat, M., Yeretzian, C., Blank, I. (2008). When Machine Tastes Coffee: Instrumental Approach To Predict the Sensory Profile of Espresso Coffee. Analytical Chemistry, 80(5), 1574-1581. DOI: 10.1021/ac702196z

Photo: Louisiana State Museum
Photo: Flickr

Godspeed.
[Comments: 3] [Tags: food, journals, science, coffee]