This simple trick makes better coffee, study says

A great cup of coffee starts with delicious beans, minimum grounds and the perfect brewing temperature. And, according to a new study from the University of Oregon, it involves getting the most from your beans.

If you grind your own coffee beans, there’s a simple trick to getting the best flavor from them: adding just a drop or two of water before grinding. And if you don’t grind your own beans, well, you should start.

The revelation of this perfect brew trick came from cleaning coffee grinders.

“Dust comes out of the grinder; it’s like a plume that covers everything,” explained study coauthor Christopher Hendon, an associate professor of computational materials chemistry at the University of Oregon. “But if you add a little water, it seems not to go everywhere. It’s cleaner.”

While Hendon and his colleagues were looking for ways to keep the grinder and its surroundings clean, they noticed that adding a small amount of water into the grinder — also known as the Ross droplet technique — also has an effect on the grinding process.

“If you add a sufficient amount of water, you can also remove the formation of the clumps,” he explained. “You will, in principle, achieve higher extractions or less waste. That’s exactly what this does because you’re now providing more available surface area for the same amount of water.”

Of course, each bean is different, so there’s no clear-cut way to measure the amount of water you should add to your grinder. But with a little trial and error, you may be able to increase flavor extraction by 10 percent.

“What I would recommend for the home user is to start with a single drop of water and build up from there — there is a substantial amount of nuance in this process,” Hendon said.