Interesting article I stumbled upon.

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2...good-.html

Rajendrani Mukhopadhyay wrote:Is that Folgers coffee in your cup or Maxwell House? Now you no longer have to rely on your nose to tell. Researchers have developed an analyzer that can distinguish between 10 commercial brands of coffee and can even tell apart coffee beans roasted at various temperatures for different times. The advance could help growers determine within minutes whether a particular batch of coffee is just as good as the previous one or whether it's undrinkable.

(cont'd)

I love the next line in the story:

"Researchers have been trying for years to come up with a simple way to analyze coffee. But it's no easy task"

TRY TASTING IT, 'YA BUNCH OF WANKERS!

A side image has the caption: "A new sensor array can tell whether a batch of coffee is drinkable [choosing between 8'Clock Colombian, Folger's Colombian, and Starbucks Colombian]." Let me save you the trouble- NONE of them! From that list, can you guess who's financing the research? I have an idea....

Next they'll be cupping paint to see what color it is. "Yummy! This tastes Blue!"

Yeah, I think the very title of the article is a misnomer. I don't believe any of those samples even roughly qualify as "Good Coffee".

I think there is something else going on here. I would guess that it is military research being thinly veiled:

"The important thing is that we can easily tell the difference between different roastings and coffees,"..... And that should help growers quickly and cheaply analyze problems with coffee, such as burnt flavors, during their initial screening process says food scientist Felix Escher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich.

Help growers find burnt flavors during initial screening? I would think that only a small percentage of growers roast their coffees for anything other than sample cupping, if that. Even many of the larger farms are coop members, so the coffee is not tested by the growers necessarily.

The article goes on to say:
The applications for the kind of device created by Suslick's team go beyond coffee, says chemist Pavel Anzenbacher Jr. at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Similar arrays, he notes, could be used in everything from detecting explosives to spotting contaminants in toothpaste.

Coffee, toothpaste, and explosives... Guess which application of this device would sell for the most money? Beyond the military use (to test toothpaste, obviously), think about government buildings, airports, etc.

What's most interesting is how the press decides to report science "news". "Electronic noses" have been used and researched for coffee sorting for about twenty years now. They've been perfected for at least eight years, since that is how long the coffee board of Brazil to has used them to create green mixes for C contracts and the big Italian espresso importers and roasters. They give an annual update at the SCAA.

Bomb sniffers use the same technology; and presumably, this has funneled a lot of money into making new and improved noses.

A mass spectrometer/gas chromatograph combination (CG/MS) can get a complete chemical signature that will identify all know compounds and give a good idea on the composition of unknown ones. However, they are expensive and take time to use. A chemical nose only picks up a small part of the spectrum, but is cheap and fast. The research effort is aimed at creating the right combination of specialized noses to make the desired discriminations (e.g. good/bad Brasil, exploding/non-exploding luggage)

Randy is right, I doubt it has any relevance to real coffee yet.