Coffee fix: MIT students decode the science behind the perfect cup

Elaine Jutamulia took a sip of coffee with a few drops of anise extract. It was her second try. 
 
“What do you think?” asked Omar Orozco, standing at a lab table in MIT’s Breakerspace, surrounded by filters, brewing pots, and other coffee paraphernalia. 
 
“I think when I first tried it, it was still pretty bitter,” Jutamulia said thoughtfully. “But I think now that it’s steeped for a little bit—it took out some of the bitterness.” 
 
Jutamulia SB ’24 and Orozco SB ’25 were part of 3.000 (Coffee Matters: Using the Breakerspace to Make the Perfect Cup), a new MIT class that debuted in spring 2024. The class combines lectures on chemistry and the science of coffee with hands-on experimentation and group projects. Their project explored how additives such as anise, salt, and chili oil influence coffee extraction—the process of dissolving flavor compounds from ground coffee into water—to improve taste and correct common brewing errors.  
 
Alongside tasting, they used an infrared spectrometer to identify the chemical compounds in their coffee samples that contribute to flavor. Does anise make bitter coffee smoother? Could chili oil balance the taste? 
 
“Generally speaking, if we could make a recommendation, that’s what we’re trying to find,” Orozco said.  
 
A three-unit “discovery class,” designed to help first-year students explore majors, 3.000 was widely popular, enrolling more than 50 students. Its success was driven by the beverage at its core and the class’s hands-on approach, which pushes students to ask and answer questions they might not have otherwise. 
 
For aeronautics and astronautics majors Gabi McDonald SB ’25 and McKenzie Dinesen SB ’25, coffee was the draw, but the class encouraged them to experiment and think in new ways. “It’s easy to drop people like us in, who love coffee, and, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s this class where we can go make coffee half the time and try all different kinds of things?’” McDonald said.

Percolating knowledge

The class pairs weekly lectures on topics such as coffee chemistry, the anatomy and composition of a coffee bean, the effects of roasting, and the brewing process with tasting sessions—students sample coffee brewed from different beans, roasts, and grinds. In the Breakerspace, students use equipment such as a digital optical microscope to examine ground coffee particles and a scanning electron microscope, which shoots beams of electrons at samples to reveal cross-sections of beans in stunning detail.  
 
Once students learn to operate instruments for guided tasks, they form groups and design their own projects. 
 
“The driver for those projects is some question they have about coffee raised by one of the lectures or the tasting sessions or just something they’ve always wanted to know,” said Professor Jeffrey Grossman of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), who designed and teaches the class. “Then they’ll use one or more of these pieces of equipment to shed some light on it.”  
 
3.000 will be offered again in spring 2025. 
 
Grossman traces the origins of the class to his initial vision for the DMSE Breakerspace, a laboratory for materials analysis and lounge for MIT undergraduates. Opened in November 2023, the space gives students hands-on experience with materials science and engineering, an interdisciplinary field combining chemistry, physics, and engineering to probe the composition and structure of materials.  
 
“The world is made of stuff, and these are the tools to understand that stuff and bring it to life,” said Grossman. So he envisioned a class that would give students an “exploratory, inspiring nudge.” 
 
“Then the question wasn’t the pedagogy, it was, ‘What’s the hook?’ In materials science, there are a lot of directions you could go, but if you have one that inspires people because they know it and maybe like it already, then that’s exciting.”

Cup of ambition

That hook, of course, was coffee, the second-most-consumed beverage after water. It captured students’ imagination and motivated them to push boundaries.  
 
Orozco brought a fair amount of coffee knowledge to the class. In 2023, he taught in Mexico through the MISTI Global Teaching Labs program, where he toured several coffee farms and acquired a deeper knowledge of the beverage. He learned, for example, that black coffee, contrary to general American opinion, isn’t naturally bitter; bitterness arises from certain compounds that develop during the roasting process. 
 
“If you properly brew it with the right beans, it actually tastes good,” said Orozco, a humanities and engineering major. A year later, in 3.000, he expanded his understanding of making a good brew, particularly through the group project with Jutamulia and other students to fix bad coffee. 
 
The group prepared a control sample of “perfectly brewed” coffee—based on taste, coffee-to-water ratio, and other standards covered in class—alongside coffee that was under-extracted and over-extracted. Under-extracted coffee, made with water that isn’t hot enough or brewed for too short a time, tastes sharp or sour. Over-extracted coffee, brewed with too much coffee or for too long, tastes bitter. 
 
Those coffee samples got additives and were analyzed using Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, measuring how coffee absorbed infrared light to identify flavor-related compounds. Jutamulia examined FTIR readings taken from a sample with lime juice to see how the citric acid influenced its chemical profile. 
 
“Can we find any correlation between what we saw and the existing known measurements of citric acid?” said Jutamulia, who studied computation and cognition at MIT. She graduated in May. 
 
Another group dove into coffee storage, questioning why conventional wisdom advises against freezing.  
 
“We just wondered why that’s the case,” said electrical engineering and computer science major Noah Wiley SB ’26, a coffee enthusiast with his own espresso machine.  
 
The team compared methods like freezing brewed coffee, frozen coffee grounds, and whole beans ground after freezing, evaluating their impact on flavor and chemical composition.  
 
“Then we’re going to see which ones taste good,” said Wiley. The team used a class coffee review sheet to record attributes like acidity, bitterness, sweetness, and overall flavor, pairing the results with FTIR analysis to determine how storage affected taste. 
 
Wiley acknowledged that “good” is subjective. “Sometimes there’s a group consensus. I think people like fuller coffee, not watery,” he said. 
 
Other student projects compared caffeine levels in different coffee types, analyzed the effect of microwaving coffee on its chemical composition and flavor, and investigated the differences between authentic and counterfeit coffee beans. 
 
“We gave the students some papers to look at in case they were interested,” said Justin Lavallee, Breakerspace manager and co-teacher of the class. “But mostly we told them to focus on something they wanted to learn more about.”

Drip, drip, drip

Beyond answering specific questions about coffee, both students and teachers gained deeper insights into the beverage.  
 
“Coffee is a complicated material. There are thousands of molecules in the beans, which change as you roast and extract them,” said Grossman. “The number of ways you can engineer this collection of molecules—it’s profound, ranging from where and how the coffee’s grown, to how the cherries are then treated to get the beans, to how the beans are roasted and ground, to the brewing method you use.” 
 
Dinesen learned firsthand, discovering, for example, that darker roasts have less caffeine than lighter roasts, puncturing a common misconception. “You can vary coffee so much—just with the roast of the bean, the size of the ground,” she said. “It’s so easily manipulatable, if that’s a word.” 
 
In addition to learning about the science and chemistry behind coffee, Dinesen and McDonald gained new brewing techniques, like using a pour-over cone. The pair even incorporated coffee making and testing into their study routine, brewing coffee while tackling problem sets for another class.  
 
“I would put my pour-over cone in my backpack with a Ziploc bag full of grounds, and we would go to the Student Center and pull out the cone, a filter, and the coffee grounds,” McDonald said. “And then we would make pour-overs while doing a P-set. We tested different amounts of water, too. It was fun.” 
 
Tony Chen SB ’27, a materials science and engineering major, reflected on the 3.000’s title—Using the Breakerspace to Make the Perfect Cup—and whether making a perfect cup is possible. “I don’t think there’s one perfect cup because each person has their own preferences. I don’t think I’ve gotten to mine yet,” he said. 
 
Enthusiasm for coffee’s complexity and the discovery process was exactly what Grossman hoped to inspire in his students. “The best part for me was also just seeing them developing their own sense of curiosity,” he said.  
 
He recalled a moment early in the class when students, after being given a demo of the optical microscope, saw the surface texture of a magnified coffee bean, the mottled shades of color, and the honeycomb-like pattern of tiny irregular cells.  
 
“They’re like, ‘Wait a second. What if we add hot water to the grounds while it’s under the microscope? Would we see the extraction?’ So, they got hot water and some ground coffee beans, and lo and behold, it looked different. They could see the extraction right there,” Grossman said. “It’s like they have an idea that’s inspired by the learning, and they go and try it. I saw that happen many, many times throughout the semester.”