Do you love coffee? I'm assuming yes, since you are reading this article. I'm also assuming you have had a bad cup of coffee: a bitter, acrid brew better suited for cleaning engines than being imbibed. It is said the seniors even prefer coffee to sex!
It may seem like some coffee is just hopeless and that nothing can fix it. That's what I thought, too.
The usual way to deal with bitter coffee is to pump it full of as much sugar as you can stand. Needless to say, that can be quite bad for you. But it also doesn't fix the underlying problem; the coffee still tastes bitter. Sugar just masks the bitterness beneath a sea of sweetness, but you can still taste the bitterness at the back of your throat.
Until I added a dash of salt to my cup.
A better solution, and one that is not readily apparent, is to add salt to your brew. This technique is not as strange as it may seem. Adding salt to coffee is common in Northern Scandinavia, Turkey, and Hungary, for example. And people in northern Sweden add salt to melt water when making coffee with it.
Plus, when cooking, you usually add salt to be rid of the bitterness. This is one of the reasons salt is so frequently used. Its addition lets the flavors of the food shine from underneath any bitterness there may be.
The exact method by which salt prevents bitter tastes is unknown. Somehow the Sodium ion Na+ interferes with the signal transduction of the bitter taste receptors. But why that should be the case is anyone's guess. However the process works, adding a pinch of salt to your coffee can take it from being an overly bitter mess to a perfectly passable brew.
The thing to keep in mind when adding salt to your coffee is that, like with sugar, you can add too much. Not only is bitterness an important part of the flavor of coffee, adding too much salt will make your coffee taste, well, salty.
As you can imagine, salty tasting coffee is disgusting. The trick is to reach a balance between bitterness and the expression of the other flavors. It is also important to remember that adding salt to a cup of coffee will not improve a good cup and in fact is more likely to destroy some of the delicate flavor that we work so hard to get in it.
So, salt is a last resort to remove bitterness.
If you are looking for a good way to improve the flavor of a bad cup of coffee that doesn't involve dumping in gratuitous amounts of sugar, you should probably give a dash of salt a try. At best it could change how you think about coffee, and at worst you will need to throw out a cup.
I think you will find that you get to keep the cup.
As an ATP pilot with an MBA in business, the author writes a daily blog about aviation called "All Things Aviation." In order to serve his community the author reviews pilot supplies for pilots.
Departing early in the morning and flying late into the night requires pilots to be and stay alert at all times, thus their near addiction to coffee. When at home I brew my coffee in my single cup coffee maker using my Keuirg coffee maker and my favorite brew.
On the road it is a little tougher to find quality coffee makers and so we wind up with a lot of bitter tasting coffee.
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