Innovative coffee filter cups enhance pour-over coffee quality while providing bioactive benefits - Challenges and opportunities

Abstract

Coffee is a popular hobby beverage with a unique flavor, while its quality has been affected by several reported factors, including the particle size and shape of the ground coffee, the contact time between the ground coffee and the water, the direction of the water flow, and other issues related to post-processing equipment. This study investigated the direction and stability of water flow in three types of coffee filter cups during coffee extraction using three different grind sizes while also evaluating the effects of physicochemical properties (including pH, total dissolved solids (TDS), color, and antioxidant abilities) and bioactivities (total phenols content (TPC), total flavonoid content (TFC), caffeine, chlorogenic acid, and trigonelline) contents extracted from coffee. This study showed that pour-over coffee preparation using fine-ground coffee resulted in high TDS content (780–799 ppm) in all filter cups, while a filter cup of prime filter type II (PF2) with medium-ground coffee yielded similar results (790 ppm). In addition, the optimum TDS content and color appearance were obtained using a ground coffee (14 g) to water (270 g) ratio to prepare pour-over coffee. Taken together, this study indicated that the use of PF2 filter cups has satisfactory performance in terms of flow direction and stability. Moreover, the pour-over coffee produced by PF2 filter cups allows the realization of high-quality and high-bioactive substance content of the coffee under the constraints arising from using the same commercial coffee beans.