Is Cloudy Pour-Over Coffee Safe to Drink? Understanding Coffee Clarity

The Truth About Cloudy Coffee: What Your Coffee's Color Really Tells You

Have you ever observed the color of coffee liquid in your daily life? It changes due to various factors: red and black, bright and dark, clear and cloudy.

What we're referring to as "soup color" is actually "tea soup color" - a professional term from the tea world. Tea can have different soup colors depending on production methods and fermentation levels. During tea evaluation, there's a step to assess the soup color according to standards. There's also a distinction in clarity: rich and transparent is considered high quality, while dim and cloudy is considered inferior! Generally, cloudy coffee often gives people the misconception that it doesn't taste good. But is this really the case?

Factors Influencing Coffee Color

When coffee extraction is normal, the coffee liquid's color generally falls within the red to black range, which is primarily determined by two factors! The most significant is the roast level of the coffee beans, which dominates the coffee's color: coffee brewed with lightly roasted beans typically appears black with red undertones, while coffee made with medium to dark roasted beans appears the opposite - red with black undertones.

The second factor is coffee concentration, which determines the depth of color! The higher the concentration of coffee, the deeper the color of the coffee liquid; the lower the concentration, the lighter the soup color appears!

Understanding Coffee Clarity

However, it's important to note that these two factors have nothing to do with coffee clarity. It's not that the darker or more concentrated the extracted coffee color, the cloudier the coffee liquid! The cloudiness of coffee liquid is related to the water solubility of extracted substances. First, there are water-insoluble substances released during the extraction process. When there are too many insoluble substances in the coffee liquid, visible cloudiness occurs! This is mainly related to the filtering performance of equipment: for example, when we do pour-over brewing, if we don't use filter paper with excellent filtering performance, but instead use flannel, metal mesh filters, or other equipment with larger gaps, some water-insoluble substances (oils, fine particles) can pass through these gaps and join the coffee liquid, making it cloudy!

Alternative extraction equipment like AeroPress is similar. Although they use filter paper with excellent filtering performance, the filter paper cannot cover all corners, allowing some water-insoluble substances (fine particles) to escape from these gaps and seep into the lower chamber with the coffee liquid, creating cloudiness! Another aspect that causes cloudiness: originally soluble substances in the coffee liquid suddenly transform into insoluble substances! What does this mean? For example, freshly brewed coffee might be very clear at first, but after sitting for a while, the coffee liquid becomes cloudy!

Conclusion: Don't Judge Coffee by Its Appearance

This is mainly because some substances in coffee condense as temperature drops, making originally dissolved substances become insoluble, creating a gritty, sand-like texture; moreover, chlorogenic acid and caffeine easily combine, and once combined, they become water-insoluble. In summary, we can conclude that cloudy coffee liquid cannot represent whether this cup of coffee tastes good or not. After all, whether it's flannel or AeroPress, although the coffee they extract is cloudy, both the flavor expression and mouthfeel experience are excellent~ Even some high-quality beans, when brewed, might become cloudy after sitting for a while, but the sweetness becomes even more apparent. Therefore, FrontStreet Coffee wants to say: judging coffee by its appearance is not the way to go!

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FrontStreet Coffee

No. 10, Bao'an Qianjie, Yandun Road, Dongshankou, Yuexiu District, Guangzhou City, Guangdong Province

Important Notice :

前街咖啡 FrontStreet Coffee has moved to new addredd:

FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473