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This Guy Knows His Beansby Bill Giduz Page 1 | Page 2 A Good Cup of Joe, From MikeFor the past four years Davidson student Michael Griffin has pursued an insatiable curiosity about coffee with the passion of a connoisseur and discipline of a scientist. Some of his friends claim he's gone too far. His student apartment is equipped with "a few grand" worth of the very finest grinders, stainless steel milk pitchers, and espresso machines in the world. He wants more, too. "My mom won't let me, but I want to sell my car to buy an espresso roaster," Griffin admitted. "They start around $5,000... I think it's perfectly reasonable, though. I'd save a lot on car insurance!"
He also stores about 30 pounds of green, unroasted coffee beans, bagged by the pound and labeled carefully to indicate the very plantation from which they originated in a dozen or so countries around the world. He brews some of those beans in his apartment as espresso or cappuccino for personal consumption. But he also subjects them to experimentation in Martin Chemical Laboratory as he seeks to discover the molecular components of the ultimate bean. "Research is imperative to the quest for better coffee," he stated. This undergraduate chemistry major from Los Angeles is quickly becoming one of the foremost coffee experts in America. He has read scores of scientific papers about coffee, and spent the last two years conducting his own experiments in the lab.
He has studied "latté art," from some of America's foremost "baristas," learning from them how to pour heart and rosetta shapes into in the steamy foam of a cappuccino. He also worked for eight months as a barista in a Charlotte Starbucks, learning first-hand how coffee houses both educate consumers and compromise quality for commerce. Griffin refines his palate by studying a coffee "flavor wheel" poster that hangs on his wall, and by sniffing a set of 24 vials of coffee aromas he bought. The most valuable lessons come from taste-testing brews from different origins four at a time. "The key for me was brewing four at a time and comparing them," he said. "When you do that you can begin to discern their different aspects." He has held several "tastings" for campus friends, and many have gained a new appreciation for the common beverage. But Griffin is wary of spending too much time serving his friends. "If you convert them you have to make them coffee all the time," he laughed. Griffin grew up in Los Angeles and began drinking cafe mochas at age 12. "I would have started earlier if I had known what I was getting into!" he joked. He became a serious aficionado of fine coffee in about 1995, then launched his career as a coffee scientist two years later when the coffee world was rocked by an amazing crop of Kenyan beans. The coffee harvested from the Kagumo plantation in 1997 carried an extraordinary amount of "brightness," making it a very hot and expensive commodity. Experts speculated that the desirable "brightness" was a reflection of the phosphoric acid content of the beans. Griffin realized the opportunity to contribute meaningfully to the science of the subject, and decided to initiate his own experiments on the Kagumo bean's phosphate levels. He proposed the study to his academic advisor, David Blauch, associate professor of chemistry, and conducted it in Blauch's class, and as part of an honors thesis research class. "It ended up being quite a detailed study of how phosphate levels vary with roasting levels," said Blauch. "Michael did a really nice piece of work." Page 1 | Page 2 |
