Welcome to another episode of weird coffee science,
and weird, today's episode is.
This one might be a head-scratcher.
Now, from time to time,
I get messages, emails, ideas from you, the viewer,
and this is one of those.
Someone called Hammad,
he's a viewer as well as a Patreon supporter,
so thank you, sent me through an idea.
He suggested that storing coffee
in a high humidity environment might be a good thing.
And I thought that was a bad idea.
I did not understand what he was talking about.
We know that moisture is bad for storing coffee
but he came with a paper showing that storing
in high humidity conditions can prevent oxidation
in certain things.
So the test was pretty simple
and he'd already conducted the test
and he was pretty excited about it.
And what you needed to do was get one of these.
This is a humidifier.
Put one of these in with your cigars
and it will keep them at a 69% moisture level, that easy.
So about a month ago, I got one of these
and I put it inside a bag of coffee.
And for a control, I got another bag
of exactly the same roast.
And they've both been sealed,
set in a relatively normal environment for about a month.
And so what we need to do now is taste them
to see if there's any difference.
In the names of science,
I'm gonna try and taste them blind.
I can't do this on my own,
so Michael's gonna help me out here.
I'm gonna step out of the studio
and he's gonna set up three cupping bowls
or cupping mugs in this case as that's what we have.
And two of them will be the same and one will be different.
And I don't know which one is which
and I will come back and I will taste them.
And see if firstly, I can tell the odd one out.
The odd one out might be the one that has the high humidity,
it might not be the one that has the high humidity.
I won't know.
And I'll try and also say with the odd one out
whether I think it's better or whether I think it's worse.
And maybe at the end of this,
there's gonna be something interesting.
So I'm gonna step away now
and I'll come back to a cupping set up,
ready to break, ready to go, and we'll go from there.
So here we are.
I've slightly rearranged this
just to make it easier for you, actually.
And also for me.
Now, I can't really see an obvious difference,
which is good.
And I don't think I can smell one either.
No.
I have an inkling of an idea, but I'm not sure.
So I'm gonna clean these
and then we're gonna have to let them cool down
for a little while.
So these are too hot to taste.
We know this 'cause we've cupped together before,
and if we haven't cupped together,
there's a little video up there for you
to get you started on how to taste coffee at home.
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We've cooled these down a little bit.
They should be ready for the first round of tasting.
And I'm a little bit nervous.
What if there's something here?
What if there's not something here?
Either way, well, it's a thing.
That's not what I thought was gonna happen.
Deep down, I thought there would just
be a very obvious, very unpleasant one.
That was the one that was high humidity.
So my first thought is this ball's a little flat.
This one's got a little bit more sparkle to it.
And annoyingly, this one's kind of in the middle.
That's the point of triangle tests.
Can I even taste the difference?
What's interesting to me is that ahead of time
if you just said one of these has been held
in a 69% humidity environment for a month,
I would've thought that would have been extremely obvious.
And it isn't extremely obvious
that there's some differences between the cups,
but the whole triangle test thing
makes you constantly second guess yourself.
All right, I think I'm ready to reach a conclusion.
I think this is the odd one out
and I think I'm gonna go against, I don't know.
I think this is the one that's high humidity.
I think this is the odd one out.
Should we find out?
And so, apparently I was right.
I have now been informed that this one is the one
that was with the high humidity pack.
It's definitely interesting.
It's definitely changed the way it's aged
and it hasn't made it oxidized in a totally unusual way.
As they're cooling now, it's definitely
a lower asset experience, which is particularly interesting.
But not really at the expense of much else.
There's less acidity than these two bowls
but it's not like you've got a bunch of other off flavors.
It's just softened it out.
If you wanna try this, I will put a link down below
to the little humidity packs.
If you wanna try this, this is a kind of odd one.
I just thought it might be worth throwing out
into the world.
Has anyone done stuff like this?
It doesn't make any sense.
It makes me wanna come back to this
in another month and to see what another month of aging
for that exact same coffee does
with that high humidity thing.
Maybe a month isn't long enough
to have really big differences show up, I just don't know.
It's tricky.
It's definitely pleasant still.
I don't know.
I'd really be interested to hear your thoughts on this one.
Initially I ended the video here,
but I don't wanna end the video here.
So I did some more testing.
I decided I would take the two bags of coffee in with me
to square model and I would brew two v60s.
I enlisted Gareth's help.
And together we brewed side-by-side.
We enlisted anyone who was willing to be on camera
and gave them two samples of coffee, an AB test.
One of the humid coffee, one of the normal coffee.
And we were intrigued to see
which one that most people picked and why.
Left.
That one.
Preference?
That one.
Why?
Fuller and more complex.
Brighter.
This one's like slightly sweeter.
Which do you prefer?
This one.
I prefer the right one.
Not very convinced with this, missing something.
This is definitely more tasty.
That one?
Tell me why.
I think it's got a bit of balance.
It's a quite tea like, sweetness, less acidity.
I think beads would bought this as it has better acids.
Now, this is not conclusive
of anything other than this was interesting.
And I think that when we brewed the two v60s side-by-side,
what was interesting to me
was how different the blooms were.
The coffee that had been stored
in humid conditions barely bloomed.
Now, I suspect extracted a little bit higher
that may have led to an increase of texture,
of mouthfeel in that particular sample.
That aside, I think everyone who tasted the two,
they were kinda surprised by the whole thing.
And I think it's just worth someone else
if you're out there, having a go with this.
Maybe there's nothing here, right?
Maybe this was just a fluke.
Maybe all of the reasons I mentioned before
on why people might choose the one store at high humidity,
I don't really know, but I would love to hear your thoughts.
So there's the links
to the little packs in the description down below.
If you're curious, you wanna try it,
I would love to see and hear
the results of your experiments too.
But I'm gonna wrap it up here and say,
thank you so much for watching.
I hope you have a great day.