To tame bitter coffee, skip the sugar and add some salt instead

Quartz wrote:Serious Eats, a food blog, suggests that adding salt to coffee powder or coffee beans before brewing can work better at reducing bitterness.

I'd be curious to see what adding salt on top of the puck would do, but there weren't any dosing guidelines listed.

The Nature paper is really fascinating...published back in 1997--I'm sure food scientists have been aware of this effect for many years. Might search for some more contemporary pubs on this topic......

I didn't read it, but salt works in this case by suppressing the bitter receptors. The problem is that there are a lot (seven is what I've heard) of different bitter receptors, and some of them are important to our enjoyment of coffee. The salt deal started with commercial coffee that was much poorer in quality than what most of us drink. When I've tried adding a tiny amount of salt (Cook's Illustrated used to recommend 1/8 tsp for 64 oz of coffee), the result has tasted sweeter, but somewhat flat and less complex to me.

Best,
David

What you say here makes a lot of sense. The Nature researchers used urea as a bitter substance. Good experiment, nice model system, but the bitterness coffee components, have to be far more complex, as you've suggested here.
No free lunch! Wonder how other ions like potassium, or divalents like magnesium, or calcium work on these receptors....???

I need to do some searching now, a while ago I ran across a forum post here on HB of someone who sprinkles a mini cocktail of minerals on the puck right before locking in. I'll look for it later tonight, it was an interesting read.

There might be another explanation. Salt dissolved in water increase the later polarity and that improves extraction - for this reason in cooking stock is better prepared when a bit of salt is added to the water.