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Have You Heard That Adding Salt to Coffee Makes It Taste Better?

Published: 2026-01-27 Author: FrontStreet Coffee

Last Updated: 2026/01/27, There's a rumor: coffee with salt is wonderfully delightful! We've seen coffee with lemon juice, with sugar, but coffee that tastes better with salt is a first-time hearing! In fact, adding salt to coffee is no longer a novel thing, as some countries have similar traditions. For example, Turkish coffee, besides being able to "continuously" overflow

There's a saying: coffee with salt is simply marvelous! We've seen coffee with lemon juice and with sugar, but hearing that salted coffee tastes better is truly a first!

Actually, adding salt to coffee isn't particularly new anymore. Several countries have similar traditions. For example, Turkish coffee, besides its ability to "endlessly" overflow and its fortune-telling function, also serves to test someone's character! (One can't help but exclaim: Oh, the miraculous Turkish coffee!!) Before marriage, the bride's family would prepare a pot of salted (or otherwise seasoned) coffee for the groom. If he could finish it without showing a "distorted expression," it would indicate his good character, and this marriage would have a happy and beautiful ending.

Historical Context of Salt in Coffee

Then there was 19th-century Europe, where coffee was prevalent, and people on every street would drink several pots daily to satisfy their cravings. But at that time, coffee had not yet entered the specialty phase - the quality of beans wasn't high. People typically roasted the beans until they were charred black, then ground them into powder and boiled them directly for drinking.

Coffee brewed under these conditions inevitably had an extremely intense bitter taste. To alleviate this overwhelming bitterness, people added seasonings other than sugar to their coffee to neutralize this intense flavor. (Sugar wasn't used because at that time, it was an expensive luxury that only nobility could afford.) Finally, people discovered that salt could actually reduce the bitterness of coffee, making what you taste more of the coffee's sweet and fragrant notes!

Why Salt Reduces Bitterness

The reason salt can reduce bitterness is because our perception of bitterness isn't a direct sensation from our taste buds. When we consume bitter substances, our taste buds release "calcium ions," which transmit bitter signals to the brain, thereby activating the receptors that perceive bitterness. When salt interferes with bitter substances, the sodium ions in salt activate the salt receptors on the taste buds and bind with them, directly weakening our perception of bitterness.

In other words, with the intervention of salt, our sensitivity to sweetness and other flavors is enhanced, making bitterness less prominent. However, it doesn't disappear - its proportion is merely reduced. Now, let's move to our experimental segment to personally experience how coffee changes when salt is added.

The Experiment

FrontStreet Coffee selected their darkest roast - FrontStreet Coffee's Golden Mandheling. The regular brewing for FrontStreet Coffee's Mandheling uses 88°C water temperature, with 70% pass-through rate on a #20 sieve, and a powder-to-water ratio of 1:15. But this time is different - we need to increase its extraction strength to release its bitter flavors, thereby obtaining a high-concentration bitter coffee. Therefore, the water temperature will be increased to 91°C, the grinding will be adjusted finer to achieve 80% pass-through rate on a #20 sieve, with three-stage water injection, and a powder-to-water ratio of 1:13.

The purpose of adding salt is to balance its flavor and suppress prominent bitterness - not to showcase the salty taste! However, the fine salt used daily is light in weight but high in salinity - just 0.01g of salt already produces a sufficiently prominent taste. Therefore, the salt adjustment will be gradually increased in increments of 0.01g for progressive measurement. We brewed three pots of FrontStreet Coffee's Golden Mandheling according to the high-concentration, high-extraction parameters. The taste experience was extremely intense bitterness. We then mixed them together to ensure that differences in extraction wouldn't lead to different results. Then we separated them and added 0.01g, 0.02g, and 0.03g of salt respectively to each pot.

The Mandheling with 0.01g salt added had less prominent bitterness but still had a relatively harsh sensation. The Mandheling with 0.03g salt had no bitterness, but the salty taste was extremely prominent - the flavor balance tipped from bitter to salty, still having a negative sensation, just with a different taste.

Only the Mandheling with 0.02g salt had a balanced taste - no intense bitterness, no prominent saltiness, easy to drink, and it enhanced the richness and thickness to some degree.

Conclusion

From the results, we learned that salt to a certain extent can indeed improve the bitter taste of coffee. But actually, similar to the "bypass" method in yesterday's article, it's mainly meant to rescue coffee that has already gone wrong or is about to fail - which is why adding salt makes it taste better.

If coffee is perfectly extracted with rich aroma, balanced sweet and sour notes, and no negative flavors, adding salt at this point would disrupt the flavor balance and artificially create negative tastes. Therefore, such additional measures must have certain prerequisite conditions!

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FrontStreet Coffee

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