Bill Ristenpart: Design of Coffee ECM 1
Bill Ristenpart deals with a lot of spattered blood and aerosolized pathogenic mouse phlegm. But when it comes to teaching wary freshman the basics of mass transfer and thermodynamics, the UC Davis professor relies on a less messy (and more potable) liquid: coffee. Beans go through so many complex chemical changes that they can easily form the basis of a whole curriculum.
Ristenpart's three year-old course, the Design of Coffee, has become the most popular chemical engineering class in the country, enrolling a quarter of Davis' freshmen.
As home kitchens have become mini-coffee labs filled with small-batch specialty roasts and hyper-precision coffee scales, consumers are demanding more coffee science and data. So Ristenpart is overseeing the development of a 6,000-square-foot center--with a initial funding from Peet's Coffee--devoted to coffee research: sustainability, chemical makeup, and preparation protocols.
Last month, researchers affiliated with the center released the first public genome of the Coffea arabica plant, which researchers hope will lead to insights into production and taste. Ristenpart's next target? The industry's sacred brewing guidelines--calibrated, as Ristenpart tells it, to the tastes of 1950s housewives. "There are all these rules of thumb out there," he says, "but very rarely does anyone have hard data to back it up." Hear that, coffee snobs? Time to go back to school.