Coffee is the ultimate rejuvenating drink which starts to freshen you up with the first sip. The bitter taste is a sort of lifeline for many who are addictive to this not so addictive drink. Though there are arguments when it comes to the probability of it being addictive or not. But how do you know if the coffee upon which you are relying, is even worth your trust. How one checks the purity of Coffee.
Presence of a chemical known as 16-O-methylcafestol (16-OMC) is generally and traditionally checked in the coffee beans, for the purity of the coffee. And as per previous beliefs, the compound is only available in Robusta and not in Arabica beans. And the process is time consuming, the process to test the purity of coffee beans starts with sending the beans to a lab for analysis, which takes approximately 3-4 days to come to any conclusion about the purity of the beans.
In this era, where GB of data transmits in second, its hard to wait for the analysis of the coffee beans which takes almost half of a week. Here is the news, that, Researchers from Britain’s Quadram Institute have discovered that a Pulsar benchtop NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) spectrometer made by Oxford Instruments can do the same thing on-site in just 30 minutes. The device uses radio waves and magnetic fields to obtain information about the molecular composition of a sample, and can reportedly be easily operated by non-specialists. It’s previously been utilized to detect horse meat in ground beef.
The spectrometer can detect Robusta concentrations as low as 1 percent in blended coffees. This device is claimed to be brilliantly sensitive. With this groundbreaking discovery, it turned out that even Arabica beans do contain small amounts of 16-OMC. Therefore, the testing procedure had to be adapted to allow for a threshold amount of the chemical, which will be detected regardless of whether or not Robusta is present. Also, this method is way cheaper than analyzing the beans in labs collected from various locations.
