How can coffee be acidic when it tastes bitter?
You can check the answer of the people under the question at Quora “why is coffee an acid“
How can coffee be acidic when it tastes bitter?
You can check the answer of the people under the question at Quora “why is coffee an acid“
Bitter, when used to describe food, doesn’t refer to ph… Not directly anyways. Chefs often claim lemon rinds to be bitter, tomato seeds or skins to be bitter or coffee too be bitter. Baking soda is bitter. Often times astringency is confused with bitter, or bitter is used to describe unpleasant flavors and sometimes textures.
Let’s look at this as two separate questions. The first question regarding coffee is answered nicely in the previous answer? The next question is: are acids sour and bases bitter? The answer to this is yes. Now… Ok 3 questions. The third is: can you have bitter compounds in solutions that are acidic? YES. Compounds like quinine, gentian extract and cinchona extract are routinely added to acidic solutions (like amaro beverages from Italy). These compounds produce the bitter flavor common to this type of beverage and yet they are acidic by nature. In the interest of full disclosure I make two commercial beverages like this in California soon to be released in NYC.
Coffee is only weakly acidic, and the bitter taste(s) in food generally come from compounds that are only very weakly alkaline or often not alkaline at all – the alkaloids. Food items with an actual basic pH are fairly unusual.
Caffeine itself, though an alkaloid, yields a 1% solution with a pH of 6.9 (ever so slightly acidic). But such a solution would probably be very bitter, rather than sour.
Why Coffee Tastes Bitter? Throughout roasting, mainly from the first cracking and at bean temperatures about 200 °C, chlorogenic acids are transformed into the related lactones through the breaking of one water molecule . This is the critical chemical stage that turns the acidic chlorogenic acids into the bitter taste.
I don’t believe that bases are bitter. Bitter is a separate taste from acid, not its opposite. If bitters were alkaline they’d react with acid and be destroyed. Alkalis tend to taste brackish, sort of flat and salty, not bitter.
During roasting, especially after the first crack and at bean temperatures around 200 °C, chlorogenic acids are converted into the corresponding lactones in a splitting of one molecule of water. That is the crucial chemical step turning the acidic chlorogenic acids into bitter tasting chlorogenic acid lactones.18 Okt 2019