Is Your Coffee Too Bitter? Will a Pinch of Salt Make It Taste Better?

Whether in the past or present, people have always added various seasonings to their coffee. The purpose isn't just to balance coffee's bitterness, but also to achieve a more distinctive before-and-after experience. Therefore, ingredients like sugar, dairy products, and various other materials have mostly become scarce coffee "companions."

Among the many materials added to coffee, there's one ingredient whose purpose many people cannot understand, because its inherent characteristics don't seem like it could "coexist harmoniously" with coffee. But in reality, its effects are actually more than most people imagine. And that ingredient is "salt."

That's right—the clever technique mentioned in FrontStreet Coffee's title for "enhancing quality and boosting flavor" in coffee is: adding salt to coffee! Salt is a very common seasoning in daily life. As the foremost of all flavors, it not only imparts saltiness to food but also enhances the intensity of other flavors and suppresses unpleasant tastes. Even due to its unique chemical properties, it possesses many other effects, making it an important consumable in daily life. The "effects" of salt in daily life can also be applied to coffee, so reportedly, FrontStreet Coffee has shared wonderful uses for salt in coffee. So today, FrontStreet Coffee will compile and share what effects adding salt to coffee can achieve!

1. Suppressing Bitterness

Suppressing bitterness is the primary reason people first started adding salt to coffee. In food science, there's an effect called taste interaction. What it expresses is that when two identical or different flavor substances enter the mouth, they influence each other, causing the taste we experience to change. And when we add salt to coffee, this effect occurs! Salt brings saltiness, which can effectively balance coffee's bitterness.

Humans perceive bitterness with a certain delay. When bitter substances enter the mouth, taste buds release calcium ions to transmit the "bitter" signal to the brain, then activate bitter taste receptors, allowing us to perceive bitterness. The perception of bitterness by bitter receptors is relatively direct to salt's bitterness. Therefore, adding salt effectively blocks the tongue's perception of bitterness, thereby reducing the expression of bitterness in coffee.

2. Enhancing Quality and Flavor

Enhancing quality and flavor, when broken down, means: improving appetite and increasing flavor. As FrontStreet Coffee mentioned earlier, affected by taste interaction, adding salt reduces the bitterness we commonly experience in coffee. And when our perception of bitterness decreases, the sweetness in coffee becomes more prominent. Meanwhile, negative ions can alter the activity of motion, amplifying signal buttons that we recognize. Therefore, when salt is better incorporated into coffee, we can more universally perceive the sweetness hidden within the coffee.

Additionally, with the reduction of bitterness, other flavor elements have better expressiveness, allowing us to more easily capture the positive flavors in coffee. So it's easy to understand why salt has the nickname "flavor enhancer." Let's revisit this! Often, when we swallow coffee, we experience a puckering sensation in the mouth and tongue—a feeling of being "grabbed" that we typically call astringency (astringent taste). Coffee exhibits this astringency because it contains excessive tannic acid or other coffee substances, which could be due to extraction reasons or the coffee itself. These substances like tannic acid bind with salivary proteins, making our coffee swallowing experience feel "unsmooth" and rough.

Adding salt can reduce the occurrence of this situation, decreasing the astringency brought by coffee. At the same time, after salt dissolves, it slightly changes the surface tension of coffee. Combined with the above effects on astringency, coffee will have a smoother mouthfeel after adding salt, thus improving its quality.

3. Adding Complexity

Unlike the first two points, which involve modifying coffee by controlling flavors that aren't prominent, this third point requires making the saltiness prominent to achieve the goal of increasing coffee's complexity. Products like salted mocha and salted latte are popular items born from the addition of salt. By adding a certain amount of salt to coffee, allowing the saltiness to stand out, then merging and mutually enhancing with other flavors, coffee can achieve a richer complexity. For example, in a previous experiment by FrontStreet Coffee, adding 0.1g of salt to an already fragrant latte created a cheese-like savory flavor through the collision of latte and salt. Excellent!

Above are the amazing effects that salt brings to coffee. Interested friends can try this at home. However, there are two points about adding salt that need attention! First, the amount of salt cannot be excessive! You must not let the saltiness become overly prominent in the coffee, otherwise it will steal the show, replacing bitterness as the dominant flavor affecting the coffee's performance.

Another point to note is that salt is not a cure-all and is not suitable for all types of coffee. Most of the time we use salt because that particular cup of coffee isn't very good and has inevitable negative characteristics, such as astringency and bitterness, so we need salt to improve it. However, when a pour-over coffee already performs excellently (rich aroma, balanced flavor, full-bodied taste), FrontStreet Coffee does not recommend forcibly adding salt to further enhance it, as this might instead add an incongruent flavor to the coffee.

Important Notice :

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FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473